European Service Modules: made in Norway

We return to a Scandinavian country in our tour of national contributions in making the European Service Modules.

Two companies from Norway are producing parts for the European Service Modules: Clara, and Kongsberg.

Clara, formerly known as Prototech, designs and builds hardware for new and adventurous frontiers of innovation.

The company is inspired by Norwegian adventurer and scientist Odd Dahl who ran expeditions to the Arctic, helped build Norway’s first nuclear reactor and was instrumental in forming particle physics organisation CERN – Clara’s next destination is the Moon.

Clara has supplied parts for the space-storm hunter ASIM that is flying outside the International Space Station as well as ESA’s dark Universe explorer Euclid. For the European Service Modules Clara is supplying a hydrophobic filter.

Stop water, not gas

The European Service Modules have water tanks and a system to deliver the water to the astronauts in the Crew Module. On Earth, water towers and gravity push water out of a tap at home, but this system doesn’t work in space, so nitrogen gas under pressure is used to push the water to the astronauts when needed.

Although nitrogen is mostly harmless for humans, the gas must not mix with the water in the system or it could interfere with the flow. To keep the H2O and the N2 separate, Clara is using a ceramic filter that stops all the larger water molecules but lets through nitrogen and works under high pressure, up to 3.5 bars.

Ceramic filters work by having millions of tiny holes that let nitrogen through (or other gases) but block larger molecules such as water or impurities. The size and placement of the holes determines what is let through and what is not. Keranor, based in Oslo, Norway, supplies the ceramic filters themselves, that Clara integrates in its filtration system.

Driving the solar arrays

From the fourth European Service Modules onwards, Norwegian company Kongsberg are supplying the Solar Array Drive Electronics that together with the Solar Array Drive Mechanism move the solar wings and keep them pointing in the best position throughout the Artemis missions.

Each European Service Module will receive two of the Kongsberg solar array drive electronics boxes that can operate up to two of the wings at the same time.

The structure for the fourth European Service Module is set to arrive at the Airbus integration hall in Bremen, Germany, next month where it will be built up with the new solar array components!