A New Way of Testing Large Thin Membrane, Optical Modal Testing of the 1/10th Scale Model of the NASA NAGT Sunshield

The Next Generation Space Telescope design includes a deployed sunshield to thermally insulate the telescope, keeping vital detector temperatures below 60 degrees Kelvin. The sunshield consists of four struts supporting four thin film membranes. Since it would be very difficult to test the full-scale sunshield on the ground due to its size and the 1-g environment, it is important to have accurate analytical models of the sunshield to analyze its affect on the observatory. A 1/10th-scale model of the sunshield has been manufactured in order to test the analytical modeling techniques used to predict the dynamic behavior of such large, lightweight structures. A modal survey test of the scale model has been performed in a vacuum environment, using a laser vibrometer to measure the mode shapes of the membranes. The presentation describes the setup and test procedures related to these tests and presents some of the experimental results obtained and the lessons learned.