Tribology Involving Solid Lubricants to be Investigated in Space

On December 6 an instrument developed jointly by TECNALIA-Aerospace and the Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial (INTA) of Spain will be launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. On board the European Space Agency (ESA) Columbus module there will be the TRIBOLAB (TRIBOlogy LABoratory). It will be located on the EuTEF (European Technology Exposure Facility) platform, on one of the exterior balconies of the Columbus module together with eight other European experiments.

The 16 kg TRIBOLAB, developed jointly by TECNALIA-Aerospace at the INASMET-Tecnalia installations in San Sebastián in the Basque Country and INTA, is made up of a bank of experiments in tribology – the science of lubricants – in order to test the behaviour of new solid lubricants designed for the highly aggressive environments encountered in mechanics in space. These extreme conditions of microgravity, atomic oxygen, vacuum, temperature and radiation are not directly reproducible on Earth and thus, the International Space Station is an environment unique for undertaking such experiments. The TRIBOLAB voyage is estimated to last for a year and a half, during which time scientific data will be sent to Earth and there monitored in real time and downloaded several times a day.