MISSE Results used for RF Plasma Ground Testing-to-space-exposure Correlation for Coated Kapton

The ability to predict the durability of materials in the low Earth orbit (LEO) environment by exposing them in ground‐based facilities is important because one can achieve test results sooner, expose more types of materials, and do it much more cost effectively than to test them in flight. However, flight experiments to determine the durability of groups or classes of materials that behave similarly are needed in order to provide correlations of how much time in ground‐based facilities represents certain durations in LEO for the material type of interest. An experiment was designed and flown on the Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE) 2 (3.95 years in LEO) and MISSE 4 (1.04 years in LEO) in order to develop this type of correlation between ground‐based RF plasma exposure and LEO exposure for coated Kapton. The experiment consisted of a sample of Kapton H® (DuPont) polyimide coated with 1300 Angstroms of silicon dioxide by Sheldahl Inc. The samples were exposed to atomic oxygen in a ra...