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| FOTON-12 capsule with BIOPAN back on EarthFriday noon (September 24th) the Russian re-entry capsule FOTON-12 landed on Russian teritorry near Orenburg. The rescue team returned to integration-site Samara on Saturday noon carrying also the Kayser-Threde developed BIOPAN. Yesterday afternoon, the facilities inside the 2.3 m FOTON capsule were de-integrated. FOTON orbited the Earth for a fortnight and performed several international microgravity experiments. First visual inspection and telemetry data analyses indicate a successful mission. Munich's space company Kayser-Threde was involved in six experiments/facilities aboard FOTON-12. First results of the most important ones are given below: BIOPAN: BIOPAN, developed by Kayser-Threde for ESA, nominally opened and closed its lid in space for the exposure of biological samples and withstood re-entry. Today, the 40 cm pan will already be opened in the clean rooms at Estec, Noordwijk. This was BIOPAN?s fourth flight piggy-back on FOTON. AGAT: The AGAT facility is equipped with six furnace chambers, filled with four experiment samples each, in order to create new material characteristics. High-precision measurements of diffusion coefficients in melts (e.g. InSn, AlNi) were performed at temperatures between 300 and 850°C and experiment times between 5 and 9 hours (45 hours in total). The experiments in four furnace chambers run very well; in two chambers, however, problems with the heating power occurred. AGAT was ordered by DLR and flew for the first time aboard FOTON. Kayser-Threde was responsible for the control system that recorded all experiment data and successfully linked the most important data down to Earth via telemetry. The QSAM (Quasi-Steady Acceleration Measurement System) facility measured microgravity quality and disturbances during several flight periods. Scientists are now awaiting measurement data in order to correlate them with experiment results and materials generated in orbit. QSAM was developed by DLR. Integration and flight were managed by Kayser-Threde. QSAM is presently discussed for use aboard the International Space Station ISS.
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1999-09-28
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