Keronite plasma electrolytic oxidation (PEO) inorganic coatings on wrought Al, Mg, Ti alloys have been deployed on numerous space missions including JWST, Sentinel 2, Sentinel 5, EnMAP, Hayabusa, Euclid, Bepi Colombo, MetOp, JUICE, CO3D, Flex and TRISHNA. The PEO coating offers competitive advantage over other space coatings e.g. black paints, PVD and black anodising alternatives due to its inorganic ceramic nature, very low outgassing, resistant to ATOX, UV and extreme thermal cycling in addition to having low reflectance and highly stable solar absorptance and emissivity.

Metal Additive Manufacturing (MAM) technologies offer unrivalled design flexibility. Space components that are almost impossible to manufacture using traditional methods are feasible with MAM. The Advanced Centre for Aerospace Technologies (CATEC) has contributed with its MAM technology to the development of various components and systems for ARIANE and VEGA space launchers, the development of QUANTUM communications satellite and to several missions of the European Space Agency (ESA) like PROBA-3 to explore solar corona; JUICE to search for life on the moons of Jupiter, and currently in the MSR-ERO mission to Mars. CATEC is the only technology centre that has developed flight components for additive manufacturing in satellites, spacecrafts, rotorcrafts and commercial and military aircrafts, and have all their manufacturing and verification processes qualified for flight by the ESA and other OEM such as AIRBUS.

This work presents the ability of the Keronite PEO technology in extending its application inside a highly complex aluminium alloy baffle of a Star Tracker for Nano Satellites, additively manufactured (AM) by Powder Bed Fusion technique. Optical and structural characterisation was carried out using UV–Vis–NIR-IR spectrophotometry and scanning electron microscopy. The black PEO coating on AM component was compared against an already qualified space black PEO coating and benchmarked against other commercially available space black coatings, achieving excellent solar absorptance properties, with α >97% and low total hemispherical reflectance (THR) ~ 3%.