Tuesday, October 14, 2008

UNH unveils satellite test lab

By Mass High Tech Staff

University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Center has opened a satellite test laboratory, a facility that is intended to allow a quicker, more economical turnaround in testing satellite components built at the center.

The $1 million National Science Foundation-funded lab provides space scientists, students, and industrial partners with a thermal vacuum chamber to test satellite components in space-like conditions and a clean-room for assembly of small satellite payloads. Scientist Roy Torbert is principal investigator for the center’s role in NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, a four-satellite mission set to launch in 2014 to study phenomena in Earth’s magnetosphere.

UNH last year was awarded $61 million from NASA to help build two instruments for each of the four spacecraft, and it will construct the central electronic controls for all the instruments being built to measure the spectrum of electromagnetic fields around the spacecraft. The Space Science Small Satellite Test Laboratory will be used to test components for that mission, and other satellite missions including the GOES-R weather satellite and the Radiation Belt Storm Probe satellites.

UNH has built components for spacecraft on 20 missions to date, the most recent being the twin STEREO satellites launched by NASA in 2006 to study the Sun, and the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite that is slated to launch on Sunday.