LARES-lab: A Thermo-vacuum Facility for Research and e-Learning

Tests of LARES Satellite Components and Small Payloads for e-Learning

A. Paolozzi

1,2,4

, I. Ciufolini

3,4

, C. Paris

2,4

and G. Sindoni

Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Salaria 851, 00138, Roma, Italy

Dipartimento DIAEE, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Eudossiana 18, 00184, Roma, Italy

Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Innovazione, University of Salento, Via per Monteroni, 73100, Lecce, Italy

Centro Fermi, Via Panisperna 89, 00184, Rome, Italy

Keywords: Thermo-vacuum Testing, Space Simulator, e-Learning, LARES.

Abstract: LARES, an Italian Space Agency satellite, has been successfully launched in 2012. A small thermo-vacuum

facility has been specifically designed and built for testing the optical components of the satellite in

simulated space environment. Due to the extremely demanding performances of LARES satellite, the

facility has been built using the most up-to-date technology available. In particular Sun, Earth and deep

space can be simulated in a ultra high vacuum. When the tests connected with the LARES mission reduced,

it was decided to devote the thermo-vacuum chamber also to didactic activities. The facility was designed to

be operated remotely only for some basic operations. The full automation of the facility is in progress in

order to provide the students and the researchers with easy and long term access, including also the

possibility to operate remotely from the internet and perform complex tests. The students will then have a

big opportunity to learn in practice all the aspects of thermo-vacuum testing, which are of paramount

importance in the space industry. It will be possible to perform thermal tests from either the classroom or

home, by exposing the specimen for a specified amount of time, toward Earth, Sun or deep space

simulators. They will collect pressures and temperatures and will input additional thermal power through

resistive heaters. The paper will first describe the facility and its capabilities showing the tests performed on

the LARES satellite components, then will focus mainly on the planned upgrades that will improve its

remote use both for research and e-learning.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Italian Space Agency (ASI) supported the

LARES mission (Ciufolini, 2011) including, among

other things, the design (Paolozzi, 2011) and the

construction (Paolozzi, 2009) of a 400 kg satellite

for testing “frame-dragging” (Ciufolini, 2007),

predicted by General Relativity. On the 13th

February 2012 the new ESA launcher VEGA

inserted perfectly in orbit LARES (Paolozzi, 2013),

the main payload, and eight small satellites built by

different universities. It was an outstanding result

considering that it was an inaugural flight, initially

devoted exclusively for qualifying this new

launcher. In 2008 ASI proposed to ESA to add a

further objective to this launch: contribute to

fundamental physics (Ciufolini, 2013a) with a very

reliable satellite. Despite the increase of complexity

of the qualification launch, ESA accepted, being also

responsive, through its educational office, towards

the university requests and allowing on board eight

more payloads.

Indeed a measurement of frame dragging with an

accuracy of about 10% was already obtained

(Ciufolini, 2004) (Ries, 2011) with the two

LAGEOS satellites. But, as anticipated in several

papers over the years (Ciufolini, 1996), with the use

of a combination of three satellites, the LAGEOS

satellites plus LARES (Ciufolini, 2003), it will be

possible to improve by one order of magnitude the

accuracy of the measurement (Ciufolini, 2012)

(Ciufolini, 2013b).

During the development of the LARES program

a critical issue arose whether it was necessary to

passively control the satellite temperature by

painting it (Paolozzi, 2012a): a high temperature of

the satellite body could both spoil the Cube Corner

Reflectors (CCRs) and increase the thermal thrust

(Bosco, 2007). Unfortunately the thermo-optical

properties of the paint are not stable in time (Marco,

2003), especially when exposed to space

467

Paolozzi A., Ciufolini I., Paris C. and Sindoni G..

LARES-lab: A Thermo-vacuum Facility for Research and E-learning - Tests of LARES Satellite Components and Small Payloads for e-Learning.

DOI: 10.5220/0005446204670474

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2015), pages 467-474

ISBN: 978-989-758-108-3

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

environment (Jaggers, 1993) (NASA, 1995). A large

degradation of the paint properties could

dramatically change the values of the non

gravitational perturbations such as the radiation

pressure. That was not acceptable for the high

accuracy required in estimation of the classical

forces acting on the satellite. It was then necessary

to perform dedicated tests in order to completely

clarify such a specific issue. To this purpose a small

but very well equipped thermo-vacuum chamber

was built. The final result was that painting was not

necessary.

Subsequently the thermo-vacuum chamber has

been also used to test the university CubeSats (Paris,

2014) and the relevant components (Cappelletti,

2011), the first Iraqi satellite (a 3U CubeSat) built at

Sapienza University of Rome within an Iraqi-Italian

cooperation (Testani, 2013), the components of the

EduSAT, a high school satellite (Graziani, 2009),

and the CCRs from the CHAMP satellite (Paris,

2015) thus showing capabilities not only for very

high standard research activities but also for didactic

purposes. More recently it was decided to increase

the potential of the chamber by enabling its full

remote use over the internet for teaching activities

through the acquisition of actuators and motors, that

need to be mounted on the facility. In the paper it is

described how the upgrade will be performed and

what the students will be able to monitor, control,

acquire and command.

2 THERMO-VACUUM FACILITY

Figure 1: Top view of the vacuum chamber.

The thermo-vacuum facility is mainly composed by

a cubic chamber of 0.6 m side (Figure 1). A first

pump (scroll pump) brings the pressure typically in

the range 10

-2

– 10

-1

millibar. The second pump

(turbomolecular pump) can operate at low pressure

and brings the pressure to the final value in the range

-9

-10

-6

millibar. The pressure is monitored with a

wide range gauge, that is constituted by a

combination of a Pirani sensor to monitor pressure

between 10

and 10

-4

millibar, and an inverted

magnetron sensor for the range 10

-4

to 10

-9

millibar.

A controller on top of the chamber connected to the

pressure gauge and to the turbomolecular pump,

transfers pressure data to the computer, allowing to

remotely operating the turbomolecular pump. A sun

simulator with an extra-atmospheric (AM0)

spectrum is fed into the chamber through an optical

window with low solar spectrum absorption.

Opposite there is another optical window with a very

accurate surface finish (lambda/20 peak to valley at

632.8 nm) used for testing, with an outside optical

circuit, the optical performances of the specimens

inside the chamber.

Figure 2: Front view of the open vacuum chamber. The

specimen under test, is mounted on the axis of the

manipulator. The cables connect the temperature sensors

and the resistive heaters to the external acquisition system.

The black walls are the liquid nitrogen cooled shrouds.

The sun simulator is outside of the right window.

A single degree of freedom manipulator allows

moving, about a vertical axis, from outside, a

specimen placed inside. An illumination system with

led stripes allows seeing inside through a small

optical window mounted on the front door of the

chamber. A number of electrical feed-throughs with

multipin connectors are used for temperature sensors

(50 pins) and resistive heaters (9 pins); the multipin

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468

connectors can withstand a current of 5 A and a

voltage of 500 V. Two independent acquisition

systems are available: the Picotech PT-104 is

specifically used for the platinum resistance

thermometers (PT100 and PT1000) and has four

channels; the HBM MGCPlus, is a 16 slot modular

acquisition system that can be used for any type of

transducers from strain gages to temperature sensors

and accelerometers. At the moment the MGC-Plus

has one slot with eight channels dedicated to PT100

sensors, three slots for a total of 24 channels for the

strain gages and one slot for the accelerometers. A

cryogenic plant completes the facility. It is an open

circuit plant. The liquid nitrogen flows through

several, in series, cryogenic coils, welded in the back

of five copper shrouds which can reach temperatures

as low as -192 °C and cover the five walls of the

chamber (Figure 2). To approach, as closely as

possible, the deep space behaviour, the shrouds are

painted with Aeroglaze Z307 with emissivity ε=

0.89 and absorptivity α= 0.97 in order to be

considered approximately as a black body (Persky,

1999).

3 EXPERIMENTAL TEST

The facility has been designed and built for the

specific purpose of testing the Cube Corner

Reflectors (CCRs) mounted on the surface of the

LARES satellite. The CCRs reflect back to the

ground stations, laser pulses allowing a ranging

estimation with accuracies that can reach few

millimetres, from the best stations. There are about

60 stations all over the world organized in the

International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS)

(Pearlman, 2002). Orbital predictions of the LARES

satellite are provided to the ILRS by the

International Space and Time Analysis Research

Centre (ISTARC) located in Rome at the Sapienza

University (Sindoni, 2014). The LARES CCRs rely

on three total internal reflections from the three back

faces (Figure 3 left); regardless of the CCR

orientation the laser beam is reflected back at 180

degrees. Since the satellite moves at a speed of

several km per second, the reflection direction needs

to be changed slightly to compensate for this motion.

That was achieved for LARES by increasing the

dihedral angles of the CCRs by an amount between

1 and 2 arcseconds. As a consequence, the energy

distribution on the ground (called more technically

Far Field Diffraction Pattern or shortly FFDP) re-

distribute, shifting from the centre to an annulus

where the ground station is expected to be, relative

to the satellite. Due to the extreme environmental

conditions in orbit, the temperature gradients on the

CCR could introduce an additional dihedral angle

offset that could prevent the reflected laser beam to

hit the ground station (Figure 3 right). Given a

temperature difference ΔT between the front face

and the apex, the change in the dihedral angle

induced by the ΔT is proportional to α

ΔT·L, where

L is the front face diameter and α

= 5.1x10

-7

-1

the coefficient of linear thermal expansion of the

Suprasil (the special glass used to manufacture the

CCRs). Therefore the first tests, performed on the

CCRs were aimed to the determination of the

experimental value of ΔT (Paolozzi, 2012b). Since

those values were exceeding the conservative

threshold fixed by the aforementioned

considerations, a much more complex test was

required for verifying directly the FFDP of the CCR

under the best possible simulated operational

conditions (Paolozzi, 2012c).

Figure 3: LARES CCR. Reflections on the three back

faces send the laser beam back to the station (left).

Thermal gradients cause a malfunctioning of the CCR

(right).

4 IMPLEMENTATION

FOR e-LEARNING

Remote labs for teaching and e-learning have

already been proposed by several projects (Herrera

2006) (Sancristobal, 2011), including also remote

operations for controlling test machines and

manufacturing processes in engineering courses

(Casini, 2001) (Aliane, 2007)(May, 2013); however

in the literature we did not find anything available

about experiments in simulated space environment.

Besides testing and research activity, the lab is

used also for teaching to the students of the courses

in Aerospace and Astronautical Engineering. The

didactic activities involve testing small spacecraft

components, such as university microsatellites. Also

more research oriented activities, such as

experiments to understand the heat transfer and the

behaviour of materials in simulated space

LARES-lab:AThermo-vacuumFacilityforResearchandE-learning-TestsofLARESSatelliteComponentsandSmall

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environments, are performed. Currently the facility

is not fully automated and the operations over the

internet are limited. Some experiment and tests can

span over several hours or even days, so it is not

very profitable for the students to stay long in the lab

after the scheduled lessons. Thus, in order to

improve the teaching capability, an upgrade of the

facility for remote control aimed at e-learning is

under development. Presently, the data acquisition

systems, the pressure meter and the pump status are

operated via USB cable by a laptop computer (the

server) where remote access software (a Virtual

Network Computing system, VNC) is installed.

With the VNC on the client it is possible to visualize

the server desktop (Figure 4) and make the

acquisition both of the temperatures and pressures as

well as switching on and off the turbomolecular

pump. Figure 4 shows the remotely controlled

desktop with the temperature sensors reading and

pump controller. This configuration is limited since

the current software allows only one client at a time

to connect to the server. Since the system was

devised to be operated by the personnel in charge of

the lab, it gives too much freedom to the client user

on manipulating or deleting files and closing

programs on the host PC. The planned improvement

aims to allow a large number of students to connect

to the lab and to perform operations such as

temperature and pressure control, orientation of the

object under test and data recording. To reach such

an objective the full automation of the operations of

the thermo-vacuum facility is under consideration;

this will allow operating the facility remotely, so that

both students and also researchers could perform

tests directly from anywhere using internet

connection. It is under consideration the possibility

to use software assigning different reading and

writing privileges to different users. Furthermore

there will be also the possibility of sharing many

read only accesses. For instance, while a teacher

operates, many students can observe directly on their

desktop the measurements in progress. At the

moment, we are verifying the possibility to apply

this approach using one of the many desktop sharing

applications available (such as TeamViewer). It

would be desirable that the user with primary write

access privilege can authorize other users to

temporary write privileges: this could be very useful

to let students operate on the system under the

remote supervision of the tutor while other people in

read only mode can observe the performance of the

experiment.

What mentioned so far is relatively convenient

because of low installation cost and manpower. On

the other side, the automation of: manipulator,

cryogenic remotely controlled valve, power control

of resistive heaters, scroll pump and Sun simulator

switching on/off is more demanding.

While the parts connected via USB can be

controlled by a single computer, once provided that

enough USB ports are available (left side of Figure

5), other components (power supply to heaters,

liquid nitrogen valve, switching on and off sun

simulator and scroll pump) need dedicated external

controllers, operated by the computer (right side of

Figure 5).

4.1 Manipulator

A stepper motor coupled with the manipulator

through a drive belt will be controlled by the

computer. The stepper motor will be mounted with

the rotation axis parallel to the manipulator axis. The

motor can be either mounted co-axial to the

manipulator drive, to reduce lateral footprint, or side

mounted and connected to the drive by a pulley. The

design of the coupling between the manipulator and

the motor shall reduce the vibration transmission to

a minimum, although in case the transmitted

vibration will be still too much, it is possible to

mount the manipulator on a passive vibration

damper similar to the one mounted on the

turbomulecolar pump. The stepper motor will be

controlled by an external controller, connected to the

PC by a USB cable.

4.2 Cryogenic Remotely Controlled

Valve

Since small temperature variations of the shroud do

not have a significant impact on the thermal

behaviour of the specimen, a precise temperature

control of the shroud is not required. The main need

is to avoid waste of liquid nitrogen that is directly

poured outside the lab in the air, being the plant an

open circuit. Two families of remotely controllable

valves are available: electrically actuated and

electropneumatic actuated valves. The electrically

controlled valve needs a high peak power to be

started and a high power to be maintained in the

open position (about 100 W), so a power relay is

needed to connect the valve to the power line.

Electrically controlled valves usually do not offer

the possibility of controlling the flow of the

liquid/gas, but can be either full open or full closed.

The models with the option of flow control are very

expensive. Furthermore the power relay needs to be

very reliable, to avoid damaging the actuator.

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Figure 4: Remote controlled desktop. Temperature sensors behaviour (top), table of temperatures (centre right), monitors

and controls of turbomulecular pump (bottom left), UltraVNC freeware software for remote operations (bottom right).

Figure 5: Full automation of thermo-vacuum facility. Left part is operational, right part is under development. 1-

turbomolecular pump, 2- pressure gauge, 3- turbomulecular pump and pressure gauge controller, 4- manipulator and stepper

motor, 5- cryogenic valve with pneumatic actuation (see Figure 6), 6- stepper motor for sun simulator diaphragm.

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471

On the other hand, electropneumatic valves are

not only cheaper but are safer and more versatile.

This kind of valves needs to be connected to an air

compressor or to a pressurized air line; the

pressurized air provides the power to operate the

valve and to control the flow of the liquid nitrogen

(Figure 6). Therefore the pneumatic valve is

considered more versatile and convenient for e-

learning. In this case an additional compressor with

relevant remotely controlled switch is required.

Although the temperature of the shroud could be

automatically controlled with temperature feedback

on the valve, for the time being it is preferred to

have, though remotely, manual activation of the

valve.

4.3 Power Control of Resistive Heaters

Also in this case, as in the previous paragraph, a

manual control, though remotely, will be performed.

In fact during the tests, described in a previous

section, it has been realized that specimen

temperature did not vary when the proper voltage

and current are fed to the heater, i.e. no need of

automatic feedback control was required.

Figure 6: Pneumatic actuated valve. The vacuum chamber

(A) is equipped with liquid nitrogen cooled shrouds. The

valve (B) will be fitted to the input nitrogen pipe (C). The

nitrogen leaves the cooling circuit from the output pipe

(D). The valve is operated by controlling the flux of

pressurized air, in the blue pipes (E).

Furthermore from a didactic point of view a too

much automated facility will be less effective. The

heaters are powered by a programmable laboratory

power unit. The power unit can be controlled by a

computer, using its software, to set the voltage and a

limit to the current. The software that programs the

power unit can be operated remotely using the VNC

system or a desktop sharing software mentioned in a

previous section.

4.4 Scroll Pump Switching

The thermo-vacuum facility does not have the

possibility to control the pressure therefore the scroll

pump needs only to be switched on before the test

and off at the end of it. The scroll pump currently

mounted does not allow remote control of the

switch. However, the pump is designed to operate

continuously for days, so a remotely controllable

simple switch on the power cable can be inserted to

serve the purpose.

4.5 Sun Simulator Switching

The sun simulator does not have a standard switch.

A simple but not straightforward procedure needs to

be applied. Also on top of this it has to be

considered that 6kW power is required to operate the

lamp. Two solutions are being considered. The first

one needs a contactor to switch on and off the Sun

simulator. The main disadvantage is the possibility

to damage the Xenon arc lamp if it is switched on

and off too often. The second solution considers a

moving screen to stop the sun simulator beam when

needed. The movement of the screen will be

operated by a servomechanism controlled from the

computer and through the VNC system also

remotely. The disadvantage of this solution is the

power consumption of the lamp that remains on also

when it is not required.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The thermo-vacuum facility created for the LARES

mission is under modification for e-learning

activities. Presently the facility can be operated

remotely only for sensor reading and for switching

on and off the turbomolecular pump. Freeware

software is installed on both the server and the

client. The improvements described in this paper

will allow the full remote access to the facility, for

both research and didactic purposes. In addition to

the present, somewhat limited capabilities, it will be

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possible to control the mechanical manipulator, the

heaters and the flux of liquid nitrogen Also the sun

simulator beam will be controlled with a diaphragm

and the scroll pump will be turned on and off with a

switch on the power line. In this way both the

students and the researchers will have the possibility

of carrying out experiments of a certain complexity

also remotely.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to thank the Italian Space Agency

for supporting the LARES mission, and in particular

the thermo-vacuum facility, under contracts

I/043/08/0, I/043/08/1, I/034/12/0 and I/034/12/1.

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