NASA Goddard Space Flight Center — Thermal Coatings

Snapshot

Why it matters internationally

GSFC’s coatings work produced the α/ε handbooks that generations of spacecraft thermal engineers treat as canonical reference data. It represents the longest continuous institutional practice of emittance measurement for flight hardware in the public record.

Scope of activity

• Quantities: solar absorptance · thermal emittance (hemispherical and normal)
• Spectral range: solar and thermal infrared bands
• Methodology: Routine solar absorptance and calorimetric/normal thermal emittance measurement of spacecraft thermal-control coatings; publisher of canonical α/ε reference compilations used across the space industry. Today the work sits in the Contamination and Coatings Engineering Branch (Code 546).

Application domains: spacecraft thermal-control coatings · α/ε reference data.

External sources

• GSFC α/ε handbook (NASA NTRS)
• Thermal coatings lecture (NASA NESC Academy)