Effects of ambient air exposure on atomic oxygen-exposed Kapton-H films

In research reporting on the effect of ambient air exposure on atomic oxygen-exposed Kapton-H film, the surface oxygen concentration of atomic oxygen-exposed Kapton-H increased with increasing atomic oxygen fluence and reached a saturated value even without ambient air exposure. These results are contradictory to the previously reported results by Grossman et al. (Grossman, E., Lifshitz, Y., Wolan, J. T., Mount, C. K., and Hoflund, G. B., "In Situ Erosion Study of Kapton Using Novel Hyperthermal Oxygen Atom Source," Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, Vol. 36, No. 1, 1999, pp. 75-78). From the x-ray photoelectron spectroscopic analysis of the atomic oxygen-exposed Kapton-H with and without ambient air exposures, it was concluded that the atomic oxygen exposure creates a highly oxidized surface and the carbon and oxygen concentrations were affected by the subsequent ambient air exposure. These results clearly indicate that the effect of air exposure should be taken into consideration in the analysis of surface chemistry of materials exposed to low-Earth-orbit space environment.