Browsing by Author "Swartout, Benjamin J."
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Item Short xEMU Pressure Garment Thermal Vacuum Test Results(2024 International Conference on Environmnetal Systems, 2024-07-21) Swartout, Benjamin J.; Sladek, Chane; Lewandowski, Michael; Westheimer, David; Rodriggs, LianaThe Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) project performed a thermal vacuum test of development-verification-test (DVT) fidelity hardware in Chamber B at the Johnson Space Center. One of the spacesuits tested was in the Short xEMU (SxEMU) configuration which included the fully assembled Exploration Portable Life Support System (xPLSS) and a partial configuration of the Exploration Pressure Garment System (xPGS). xPGS components includes the Hard Upper Torso (HUT), hatch, shoulders, arms, helmet and visor assemblies. Since this test article had the complete xPLSS, emphasis during testing was directed towards evaluating its performance by running metabolic loads at different thermal environments. Therefore, the HUT was filled with instrumentation to verify performance of the life support system. This internal instrumentation package did not provide an internal thermal boundary for the suit that simulated a person wearing a Liquid Cooling Garment (LCG) well, so some testing concessions were made when setting testing environments for the xPGS components to ensure hardware temperature limits were not exceeded. In spite of these limitation, external temperatures ranging between 40�F and 170�F were achieved and can be correlated against previous thermal models. This unmanned thermal-vacuum test was a unique configuration that provided valuable data on the xEMU design and also services as reference point for future spacesuit thermal-vacuum tests.Item xEMU Thermal Vacuum Testing Overview(2024 International Conference on Environmnetal Systems, 2024-07-21) Westheimer, David; Rodriggs, Liana; Falconi, Eric A.; Swartout, Benjamin J.; Lewandowski, MichaelThe Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) project was the culimation of over a decade of spacesuit development that was performed in-house at the NASA Johnson Space Center. This project reached a level where almost fully completed development fidelity spacesuits had been designed, assembled and tested in an integrated configuration. The xEMU Development-Verification-Test (DVT) hardware was assembled into two different xEMU test articles and underwent a series of thermal-vacuum tests at the Johnson Space Center�s Chamber B. These tests not only gathered data on thermal performance, but also exercised the life support system, communication system, suit information systems, and suit avionics. This complex test has and will continue to produce many meaningful reports ranging from component level test results (for example on spacesuit boots), test design of heater cages to simulate thermal environments for a spacesuit test article, and higher level thermal performance of subsystems (such as the Portable Life Support System) or the entire assembly. This paper provides an overview of the test configuration and also top level results from this highly successful integrated test of the xEMU.