Quest Thermal designs ultra-light weight LHe dewar
Quest Thermal, in a six month NASA SBIR Phase I program, designed, built and tested a 0.3m diameter prototype of a new ultra-lightweight dual vacuum shell LHe dewar. NASA has need of a lightweight dewar for LHe cooled stratospheric balloon observatories. A conventional 4m diameter dewar is 2676kg, a Quest dewar would be 268kg, with heat leak reduced from 1.8W/m2 to 0.32W/m2 with Quest Light Weight Dewar (LWD) technology. LWD is at TRL4, and reduces the mass of a LHe dewar to well within the lift capability of a stratospheric balloon, enabling future 4m fully cryogenic far-IR telescope observatories.