The facility supports qualification and acceptance testing for small spacecraft and payloads: thermal-vacuum cycling, thermal balance and vibration to launch environments.
Its most valuable service to a first-time team is the insistence on procedure. Before a chamber is pumped down, there is a written test procedure with pass criteria, instrumentation locations, abort conditions and a named person authorised to stop the test. Teams find this laborious in advance and are grateful for it at two in the morning when a thermocouple reads something unexpected.
Booking behaviour is the commonest failure mode. Chamber slots are finite, campaigns take longer than teams project, and a procedure takes weeks to write and review. Programmes that book a slot early and design towards it succeed; programmes that finish the design and then look for a chamber wait, sometimes for months.
Staff are experienced with academic payloads, commercial platforms and the particular anxieties of a team testing flight hardware for the first time.
Specification
- Thermal-vacuum chamber suitable for payloads up to 12U class
- Vibration table for sine, random and shock profiles
- Multi-channel thermocouple and instrumentation logging
- Thermal balance test capability with solar simulation
- Clean assembly and integration area adjacent to the chambers
- Contamination monitoring during chamber operations
What it is the right answer to
Jobs this facility genuinely suits.
- Thermal-vacuum qualification and acceptance campaigns
- Thermal balance testing to correlate a thermal model
- Vibration qualification against a launcher environment
- Bake-out of assemblies ahead of delivery
- Anomaly investigation after an unexpected first campaign result
What to bring
Turning up without these costs facility hours rather than bench hours.
- A draft test procedure, or the intention to write one with facility staff
- Your thermal model and the predictions the test is meant to check
- Instrumentation plan, including where thermocouples will actually fit
- A named test conductor and a person authorised to stop the test
What you leave with
- Full instrumented logs across every cycle, with anomalies annotated
- A test report against the agreed pass criteria
- Correlation data for updating your thermal model
- A pass, a fail, or a clear description of what remains unproven
Limitations
Worth knowing before you write the proposal.
- Payload size is limited; larger spacecraft need a commercial facility
- No testing proceeds without an approved procedure, whatever the schedule pressure
- A failed campaign consumes the slot, and the next one may be months away