UK Space Facilities MSSL Thermal Vacuum Chamber

MSSL Thermal Vacuum Chamber

Capabilities

MSSL has a number of thermal-vacuum, vacuum-bakeout and cryogenic vacuum facilites used for qualification and acceptance testing of flight hardware, as follows:

20K Cryostat
The 20 Kelvin vacuum cryostat is a multi-shroud design, with 5 concentric shrouds, allowing efficient thermal de-coupling of the flight hardware from the external environment.
70K Cryostat
The 77K vacuum cryostat is mainly used for testing/ characterisation of flight CCDs.
Leybold thermal vacuum chamber
The TVAC chamber can be configured either as a conventional thermal-vacuum chamber or as a low energy electron calibration chamber, the latter configuration being normally for sole use by MSSL.
Vacuum bakeout facility
The bake-out facility comprises a stainless steel oil-free vacuum chamber with radiative and conductive heating elements to ensure even heating of hardware in the vacuum volume, instrumented with a residual gas anayser and TQCM monitor.