Design of Innovative High-Performance Polymer for Passive Lunar Dust Mitigation

Dust in space environments is now recognized as a major concern for successful manned and robotic exploration and colonization missions. Indeed, a thin layer of dust covers the lunar surface made of loose granular material, consisting of a broad range of shapes, sizes, and types of sediments, which mainly consists of silicate minerals in the form of micrometric, sharp, abrasive, porous, chemically reactive dust particles. The aim of this paper is to present preliminary results related to the design and development of an innovative, lightweight, high-performance polymer with an elevated strength-to-weight ratio able to mitigate particle contamination. In detail, dust mitigation or the minimization of the surface energy and consequently the adhesion forces among the external layers and the granular dust micrometric particles can be achieved through modifications of the surface properties by means of both chemical and physical methodologies. The proposed approach, to realize an innovative material and not a hydrophobic coating, is potentially applicable to a wide range of technological conditions and it relies on reproducible and controllable chemical modifications of the material’s surface properties through the design and synthesis of suitable base materials i.e., aromatic polyimides and copolyimides and incorporation of special low molecular weight additives, i.e., surface migrating agents, loaded directly within the reacting mixture during the intermediate phases of the copolymerization. The materials investigated in this work exhibit mechanical properties able to withstand the extreme space environment conditions and an elevated non-sticking behaviour of its surface layers in contact with granular, micrometric dust particles of lunar regolith i.e., abhesion capacity.