Design and Manufacture of a Highly Reliable, Miniaturized and Low Mass Shutter Mechanism

This paper describes the development, manufacturing and testing of a lightweight shutter mechanism made of titanium for the MERTIS Instrument. MERTIS is a thermal infrared imaging spectrometer onboard ESA's future BepiColombo mission to Mercury. The mechanism is built as a parallelogram arrangement of flexible hinges, actuated by a voice coil. In a first test run, it was shown that the selected EDM processing led to the generation of titanium oxides and an oxygen-enriched surface layer on the substrate (so called alpha-case layer). In the revised version of the shutter, it was possible to manufacture the complex geometry by micro-milling and an adjacent pickling procedure. The adequacy of this approach was verified by lifetime and vibration testing.