What it is made of, what it is not made of, and how it was put together?

Or how to make an educated guess regarding what parts, materials, and processes were used in your museum piece

Dr. Meg Abraham, Advancing Heritage

When one wants to conserve material culture for historical purposes, it is very often considered a basic tenant of conservation that practitioners should minimize invasive treatment methods used to stabilize material culture. Conservators should avoid the use methods or materials that they know could adversely affect the future ability to conserve or understand the history of the piece. To that end, it is often the case that conservation practitioners and museum professionals would like to know what materials were used to make the piece in the first place. In the case of space-based material culture, there may be a host of materials used to make a space worthy flight article. Still, conservation specialists and museum professionals can, with appropriate understanding of the intent of the hardware and the standards used to make the hardware, make some educated guess as to what materials were used to make the hardware. This approach may minimize the cost of analysis and aid in the most appropriate techniques used for preservation the original design.
Until very recently, almost all heritage space flight hardware was designed and built by about 10 countries with extensive information sharing among many of them. Organizations such as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), UK National Space Agency (UKSA) or European Space Agency (ESA) often collaborate to supply subsystems and instruments for well know space flight missions using shared design rules and quality expectations. In all cases these organizations rely on a set of procedures and flight heritage parts materials and processes (PMP) to ensure mission success and reliability in space. Through these collaborations, the knowledge of successful flight heritage materials and processes are often shared between agencies as international standards or through joint program efforts. For NASA the top-level document for flight hardware design is Goddard Space Flight Center Standard 1000 (GSFC-STD-1000 aka The Gold Rules). This document defines “Rules for the Design, Development, Verification, and Operation of Flight Systems”. From this document flows to a host of further documents and requirements that are used to build space flight hardware. NASA relies on “paper” or flight verified materials, standards, and requirements to minimize risk of failure and insure performance expectations and reliability. In so many cases the information is there for later preservation efforts if one knows where to look.
In this presentation, I will discuss the standard Parts Materials and Processes, Contamination Control (CC) and Integration and Test (I&T) procedures used to build space flight hardware and how they can inform the preservation of space flight material culture. The topics will include the implications of the intended use for the hardware (humas space, optical instrumentation, or Communications), rules for laboratory conditions, the requirements for Engineering Units (EU) and Ground support Equipment (GSE), materials usage information resources (banned materials lists, the Materials and Processes Technical Information System (MAPTIS) website and the outgassing website), Bakeouts and Environmental testing that flight hardware are subjected to, documentation, and finally a few small thoughts on handling flight hardware.

Bio:
Meg works both in conservation sciences and in space hardware development. Conservation related accomplishments include a Masters in Archaeological Research (UCLA), as well as research for Getty (Cleaning techniques - China’s Mogao) and developing test and training Laboratories (LACMA). Meg” Doctorate from Oxford Materials Department researched depth profiling analytical techniques for metals. Meg has also supported approximately 20 spaceflight programs, large and small, include NirCam-JamesWeb, Mars 2020, GOES, and LADEE. Meg is currently supporting the VIPER Lunar rover program and HelioSwarm (9 satellites designed to observe turbulence in solar wind, charged particles released by the sun and interplanetary magnetic fields).