Establishing a Standardized Test Method for Evaluating Space Suit Gloves Thermal Performance at Lunar South Pole Temperatures

The Artemis space suit glove environmental protection garment (EPG) will be the first line of protection used to shield the crewmember’s hands from the thermal extremes encountered during Lunar South Pole extravehicular activity (EVA). As the Artemis missions will include more extreme thermal environments than those experienced during Apollo and on the International Space Station, development, verification, and validation of gloves poses challenges. There are no standardized tests defined to evaluate the thermal protection of space suit gloves at the lunar temperature extremes found in the permanently shadowed regions (PSR). Also, there is insufficient data on state-of-the-art glove performance in a lunar PSR from which to compare new designs. It is therefore necessary to define tests to evaluate glove thermal performance to determine if they are sufficient to meet new, challenging requirements. This paper focuses on the development of a test procedure to characterize lunar EVA glove EPGs thermal conductivity at increasing colder temperatures down to Lunar PSR equivalent temperatures and then using that procedure to collect data on the Phase VI Glove. The test utilized a Thermal Hand System (THS), a thermally controlled manikin hand outfitted with a suite of sensors, and three thermal fluid loops to simulate human blood flow. The data was used to correlate a thermal math model of the glove which was run real-time during testing to help predict initial conditions and thermal response times. Following correlation of the thermal glove model, new glove curves were generated. The glove curves can be used to determine the permissible touch durations at different environment temperatures including lunar PSR temperatures.