Airdate: July 6th, 2023
There’s been a resurgence in American’s interest in the space program and NASA. Nothing like during the Apollo era in the 1960s and 70s, and perhaps it has to do with private companies sending people to space, but still more people seem to be following what NASA is doing and especially for plans to return to the moon.
A Lancaster company will be part of that venture and others with NASA. Advanced Cooling Technologies describes itself as a thermal management solutions company.
On The Spark Thursday Bryan Muzyka, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for ACT and a board member of the Keystone Space Collaborative talked about how ACT will be part of the VIPER moon vehicle and what it’s “warm box” will do,”Artemus is kind of the foundational NASA program to to bring life to the moon. But one of the key aspects in there is to create sustainable life. You need a water source. Not only does water give you kind of nourishment, but it also can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, and that can be used for fuel. So water is kind of the key element in all of these areas. And what NASA has found is that there appears to be large amounts of water harvested in the south pole of the moon. And the challenge is, is getting there and and confirming that hypothesis. So Viper is going to be the mission that is going to land and track that terrain and and basically be able to confirm that there is that there is water there.” “So, the the warm box and I guess where Advanced Cooling Technologies comes into play is one of the biggest challenges with going to the South Pole of the moon is when it goes to darkness, let’s say lunar night, it goes to darkness for 14 days. And during that time, it’s at temperatures close to liquid nitrogen. So it’s extremely cold. And what could happen in that environment? You have all this precious electronics and testing and sampling equipment. You could over cool it or freeze it and and cause catastrophic damage. So it is creating a thermal management system that can during fully operational, where everything’s on and getting hot, it could transfer and reject the heat to deep space, but also create a thermal control system that creates this warm box which keeps things from damaging during the 14 day lunar night.”
Muzyka said the VIPER vehicle is scheduled to launch next fall.
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