Compliant mechanisms for dust mitigation in Lunar hardware development: technology and material considerations

During the Apollo missions, astronauts observed negative impact of Lunar dust on the surface hardware. The characteristics of Lunar environment and the regolith properties accelerate the contamination and promote the abrasion and clogging of different components in the equipment. To protect the hardware from damages in the future Lunar missions, several mitigation technologies must be adapted. In this work, we propose to consider application of solutions that are naturally dust resilient. Such solutions, called implicit dust mitigation technologies, include usage of compliant mechanisms. Compliant mechanisms use elastic deformation to achieve motion and can replace rigid-body mechanisms that suffer increased friction and jamming due to dust accumulation in the inter-element gaps. Material selection for compliant mechanisms needs to be considered very early in the design process, and as demonstrated in our work, it is crucial to the final mechanism performance.