Spacecraft Surface Environmental Pollution And In-orbit Monitoring Technology

Spacecraft contamination is a new science field developed since the launch of first man-made satellite. Research in this field is of great importance for the understanding of interaction between spacecraft and its environment as well as the spacecraft design and its performance in orbit. US had started the research and developed monitoring technologies since 1960's, and a large amount of results from in-situ measurements and active protecting experiments have been made. In our nation the research in this field has been in preliminary stage, and the in-situ measurement technology has been just developed initially. In this report, based on the analysis of trends and research status of spacecraft contamination and its measuring technologies beyond and inside the country, the theory about spacecraft contamination was argued, and the design plan for Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM) which is the most important in-situ measurement instrument for contamination monitoring was introduced, including working principle, designation, key technology, etc. Also, the ground experiment results and calibration methods for QCM were revealed in the report. The results show that the approachments applied for key technologies have fulfilled their mission, the primary performance of QCM prototype model approaches the advanced world level. Meanwhile, taking into account that China's deep space exploration program is in schedule, a new instrument proposal for detecting Martian dust accumulating rate as well as charging and magnetic characteristic was proposed based upon the development of QCM. And the possibility of detecting water on Mars surface was discussed.The extended work on spacecraft contamination and QCM were also displayed. The author hoped that through the work on the report, the research on spacecraft contamination and QCM can be furthered, and more measurement and active protection experiments can be scheduled in the coming future.