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We are pleased to announce the second set of DISCOVERER Materials samples were carried to the ISS from the Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, on-board Space X mission CRS-23 launched on 29th August 2021 as part of MISSE 15.

The ISS deployment was made possible by Alpha Space Test & Research Alliance, which owns and operates the Materials on the International Space Station Experiment (MISSE) facility, under agreements with NASA and the International Space Station National Laboratory (ISSNL)

These samples will be mounted onto the exterior of the ISS, both on the RAM and WAKE, within the next couple of months. The materials will then be exposed to the harsh LEO (Low Earth Orbit) environment, to investigate their erosion properties. After six months, they will be returned to Earth for analysis at the University of Manchester, where it is hoped they will be used in a new generation of very-low-orbit satellites. Our previous samples flown on MISSE 12 are now back at the University of Manchester where a variety of characterisation and other analysis are being carried out to understand how the properties have performed in the LEO environment.