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Advanced Cooling Technologies awarded NASA contract
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Lancaster-based Advanced Cooling Technologies was awarded a $3.7 million contract by NASA to finalize the design and fabricate the flight thermal control system for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER.
Part of the Artemis program, VIPER is a golf cart-sized rover that will roam across several miles of the moon’s south pole during its mission to get a close-up view of the location and concentration of ice. According to a release, VIPER is NASA’s first lunar robotic rover, and this is the first resource-mapping mission on the surface of another celestial body.
The thermal control system developed by Advanced Cooling Technologies and NASA will be the first to maintain operation for a 100-day mission while in shadow.
“It’s exciting to demonstrate some of the best passive thermal management solutions on such an important mission,” Bill Anderson, chief engineer at Advanced Cooling Technologies, said in the release.
The company will coordinate system and subsystem-level thermal analysis, verification and thermal testing as well with NASA’s teams at Johnson Space Center in Houston and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The timetable is for VIPER to land on the lunar surface in late 2023. This is just the latest NASA project for Advanced Cooling Technologies. In the spring, it received a contract from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for engineering development and flight hardware manufacturing for instrument parts on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
