Environmental Challenges to OASIS’s Primary Reflector

Abstract

This paper discusses pressure control for the OASIS primary antenna element, A1. This discussion is centered around the evaluation of pressure changes and what might drive them. A1 is created from thin polyimide film and from its orbital position near Sun-Earth L1, is subject to many environmental effects, the solar wind, radiation pressure, charging and micrometeoroids. This paper begins by describing the architecture of the pressure control system. We show that the solar wind and radiation pressure are too small to impact A1’s performance. We also discuss the need to connect the A1 to system ground for solid technical and programmatic reasons. A large section discusses the micrometeoroid environment and how recent mission data shows that the flux faced by OASIS is likely larger by factor of ~3 than might be expected from naive application of the traditional models.