The Thermal Vacuum Chamber and Optical Testing Lab has been created and used to qualify the materials and the CCRs used on LARES satellite.
The Space Environment Simulator can be used for environmental testing of micro and nano satellites, satellite components and payloads.

Facility Description

Thermal Vacuum Chamber: cubic, internal volume 60x60x60 cm. Duble stage vacuum pumps. Pressure P<10-6 mbar.

Solar Simulator: Spectrolab Xenon lamp, AM0 spectrum. Beam intensity constant over a 12x12 cm area. The beam enters the test area from a 127 mm diameter fused silica window.

Cooling: a shroud on five walls of the chamber can be cooled with liquid nitrogen (T < -180 °C) to simulate Deep Space.

Thermal Monitoring: the temperatures inside the chamber are monitored using platinum thermoresistors PT100, with a precision of 0.3 °C.

Electrical Feed-Throughs: multi-pin Sub-D connectors can be used to power instruments, resistive heathers and sensors inside the chamber.

Mechanical Feed-Through: a one degree-of-freedom manipulator can be used both to support and to orientate the Unit Under Test inside the vacuum chamber.

High Quality Optical Window: a 76mm diameter high quality (λ /20) optical window allows testing optical components from outside inside the chamber.

Optical Bench: an optical bench outside the chamber is used to create optical circuits to test components using the high quality window.



Contacts and Location

Location: Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale - Sapienza University of Rome
Via Salaria 851, 00138 Rome - Italy.

Contacts:
Antonio Paolozzi. e-mail: antonio.paolozzi@uniroma1.it

Claudio Paris. e-mail: claudio.paris@uniroma1.it

Telephone: +39 06 49919767 - 769