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Concept
Materials Science Laboratory
Summary
The Materials Science Laboratory (MSL) of the European Space Agency is a payload on board the International Space Station for materials science experiments in low gravity.
It is installed in NASA's first Materials Science Research Rack which is placed in the Destiny laboratory on board the ISS. Its purpose is to process material samples in different ways: directional solidification of metals and alloys, crystal growth of semi-conducting materials, thermo-physical properties and diffusion experiments of alloys and glass-forming materials, and investigations on polymers and ceramics at the liquid-solid phase transition.
MSL was built for ESA by EADS Astrium in Friedrichshafen, Germany. It is operated and monitored by the Microgravity User Support Center (MUSC) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, Germany.
MSL was launched with Space Shuttle Discovery on its STS-128 mission at the end of August 2009. It was transferred from the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module to the Destiny Laboratory shortly after the shuttle docked at the International Space Station some two days after launch.
After that the commissioning activities started to check out first the functionality of the Materials Science Research Rack and MSL inside MSRR. The commissioning included the processing of the first two samples which took place at the beginning of November. After bringing those two samples back to ground for analysis by the scientists the rest of the samples from batch 1 will be processed in early 2010.
The Materials Science Laboratory (MSL) facility is the contribution of the European Space Agency to NASA's MSRR-1. It occupies one half of an International Standard Payload Rack.
The MSL consists of a Core Facility, together with associated support sub-systems. The Core Facility consists mainly of a vacuum-tight stainless steel cylinder (Process Chamber) capable of accommodating different individual Furnace Inserts (FIs), within which sample processing is carried out. The processing chamber provides an accurately controlled processing environment and measurement of microgravity levels.
Official source
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