The Artemis space suit glove environmental protection garment (EPG) will be the first line of protection used to shield the crewmember's hands from the environments encountered during extravehicular activity (EVA). As the Artemis missions will include more extreme environments than those experienced on the International Space Station, development, verification, and validation of gloves poses three key challenges. First, there are no standardized tests defined to evaluate the durability of space suit gloves for the extreme lunar environments, particularly against the continual threat of inadvertently cutting the fabric of the glove. Second, there is insufficient data on state-of-the-art glove cut performance at lunar temperatures from which to compare new designs. Third, current ISS glove Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment (TMG) fabrics are unlikely to be sufficient to meet Lunar requirements. It is therefore necessary to define tests to evaluate if glove fabrics can meet new, challenging cut requirements. This paper focuses on the development of a test procedure to characterize the cut resistance of lunar EVA glove fabrics at cryogenic temperatures using a modified ASTM standardized test method. The results of testing on Phase VI glove fabrics are presented.
Jones et al. (Sun,) studied this question.