Electrostatic discharge (ESD) continues to pose significant risks to space missions despite decades of intense study. Tabulated values of material breakdown strength used in spacecraft charging models are often based on cursory measurements that may not be relevant to a given mission. Materials physics offers insight into the relevant variables that affect breakdown and how to address them experimentally for spacecraft applications. Measured distributions of ESD data across several test configurations, taken together, begin to provide an understanding of how to estimate the likelihood of ESD events as a function of acquired charge over a spacecraft's mission lifetime. We discuss how consequences of these results apply to spacecraft charging modelling and design considerations.

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This work investigated the dependence of electrostatic field strength for spacecraft materials on voltage ramp rate, by applying an increasing electrostatic field until electrostatic breakdown occurred.