CLPS EDS Payload Thermal Design and Analysis

NASA’s Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS) payload was one of ten CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) payloads on the Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander’s first mission that performed the first fully successful commercial Moon landing on March 2, 2025. While seated on the lunar surface, the EDS payload successfully demonstrated its ability to remove lunar regolith from sample surfaces made of glass and a thermal radiator material, marking a significant step in future lunar and interplanetary operations by proving a technology that can reduce dust-related impacts on hardware surfaces.

For the payload to reach the lunar surface and successfully perform its mission, it required a thermal design that could maintain its components within their temperature limits during the 46-day lunar transit, the descent of the lander to the lunar surface, and the lunar surface thermal environment, while meeting the payload mass, dimensional, and power draw requirements set by the Firefly lander. The EDS payload’s proximity to the lander’s main engine and view factor to the Sun while on the lunar surface were extra challenges to design for. This presentation will give an overview of the payload’s thermal design, the Thermal Desktop model of the payload, its protoqualification thermal vacuum testing of the hardware, challenges with the installation of flight MLI blankets, and a comparison of pre-flight temperature predictions versus actual flight data, with numerous lessons learned along the way.

At the time of this abstract submission, the EDS Thermal Desktop model has not yet been fully investigated to determine the root cause(s) of the gaps between the pre-flight predictions and the actual flight data that was experienced on the lunar surface. There are three plausible factors for the gaps, which are: the Thermal Desktop solution for lunar surface temperatures was not conservative enough, the lunar terrain of the landing site created unexpected radiation environment for the payload, and the dust loading from landing significantly degrading the payload hardware’s optical properties. It is the intention of the author that these three factors will be investigated and presented as a completed study during TFAWS 2025.