Preparing for Astronaut Glove Testing in CITADEL

Spacesuit engineer Shane McFarland, left, of the Advanced Suit Team at NASA's Johnson Space Center prepares an astronaut glove for thermal vacuum testing inside a chamber at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Nov. 1, 2023. Tim Brady of the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC), which spearheaded the glove testing campaign, looks on as McFarland positions the glove in a load lock – one of four small drawer-like chambers through which test materials are inserted into the larger main chamber of a facility called CITADEL (Cryogenic Ice Testing, Acquisition Development, and Excavation Laboratory).

The glove was tested at vacuum and temperatures as low as minus 352 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 213 degrees Celsius) – temperatures as frigid as those Artemis III astronauts could experience on the Moon's South Pole. Built to prepare potential future robotic spacecraft for the frosty, low-pressure conditions on ocean worlds like Jupiter's frozen moon Europa, CITADEL has also proven key to evaluating how astronaut gloves and boots hold up in extraordinary cold. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center spearheaded a glove testing campaign in CITADEL from October 2023 to March 2024.

Part of a spacesuit design called the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, the gloves tested in the chamber are the sixth version of a glove NASA began using in the 1980s. The testing in CITADEL showed that the legacy glove would not meet thermal requirements in the more challenging lunar South Pole environment.

In addition to spotting vulnerabilities with existing suits, the CITADEL experiments will help NASA develop this unique test capability and prepare criteria for standardized, repeatable, and inexpensive test methods for the next-generation lunar suit being built by Axiom Space.