Reduced gravity flight demonstration of the Dust Shield technology for optical systems

The electrodynamic dust shield (EDS), an active dust mitigation technology for lunar exploration systems, has been under development in our laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center for the last three years. The EDS uses electrostatic and dielectrophoretic forces to remove dust from opaque, transparent, rigid, and flexible surfaces. The EDS consists of an array of electrodes on a substrate that are coated with a material possessing a high dielectric constant. The EDS has been tested with JSC-1A lunar dust simulant at high vacuum pressures of the order of 10^-6 kPa. In this paper, we report on our demonstration of the EDS at high vacuum (10^-6 to 10^-7 kPa) and under lunar gravity (g/6) during a Reduced Gravity Flight. Over one hundred and twenty experiments were performed to test the removal of different dust particle sizes using several EDS configurations and coatings. Particle sizes ranged from under 10 micrometers to 450 micrometers, separated in four different size fractions.