Keeping Cool in Space

Imagine you are an Astronaut on the Moon. Your job for the next eight hours will be exploring, collecting science samples, traversing up and down lunar hills, sampling rocks, and setting up equipment as part of the Artemis program. Temperatures on the lunar surface can reach a blistering 250 degrees Fahrenheit. How does NASA keep astronauts cool in spacesuits so that they can work on the Moon? Fortunately, each spacesuit includes a personal cooling unit. As NASA embraces commercial partnerships to optimize spacesuit technology as part of the Artemis program, the Spacesuit Evaporation Rejection Flight Experiment (SERFE) payload continues to be tested onboard the International Space Station. SERFE is designed to evaluate and demonstrate active thermal control technology in the microgravity environment of the International Space Station. At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, engineers have been performing the exact same test on the ground on an identical SERFE unit.