Microchannel thermalization inlet design to reduce the chemical effects caused by hypervelocity conditions during satellite observations in space exploration.

Orbiting satellites and flybys are on-site instruments that can be used to search for biosignatures of life in space. Usually, they can be equipped with analytical instruments that can detect the composition of gasses while orbiting around an interstellar body in space. In closed-source systems, due to the velocity of the satellite in relation to the incoming molecule, sampled molecules hit the antechamber walls with enough kinetic energy (5-20 km/s) to produce importance chemical changes even fragmentation in the sampled molecules. Thus, leading to the loss of structural and chemical information of the molecules prior impact. Moreover, hypervelocity impact mechanisms of neutrals are not well understood yet. We present a novel inlet design to reduce the effects of chemical effects caused by hypervelocity conditions in space Figure 1. Calculations suggest that a microchannel thermalization inlet, which consist on an array of channels in a plate, can reduce or eliminate fragmentation of the sampled species allowing them to thermalize quicker and with good sensitivity.