Space Habitation and Life Support Commons^™

Design And Development Of A Passive Dust Protection System For Lunar Docking Operations, Simon Thengvall

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Lunar docking systems face a unique set of environmental conditions that can create significant challenges for mechanical design. Among these, the abrasive nature of lunar regolith can impair the kinematic function of traditional terrestrial mechanisms as well as contaminate critical spacecraft components such as environmental seals, causing them to fail. For crew-rated docking systems, failure of these systems not only threatens mission success, but also crew safety, so dust protection is crucial for docking components. To address the concerns of regolith intrusion, the Simple External Attachment for Lunar Openings (SEALO) is developed as a key architecture for mechanism evaluation when …