PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF CRYSTAL-GROWTH EXPERIMENTS ON BOARD EURECA-1

The European Space Agency ESA will fly on board of the retrievable carrier EURECA-1 the protein crystallization facility PCF. The facility will be used to perform 12 independent crystal growth experiments for a time period of 4 to 6 months in the microgravity environment of space. The mission scenario considers only little contact (3% of the time in space) between ground control facilities and the spacecraft. This means, that the experiment facilities in space have to work in a more or less automatic mode. To take advantage of the experimental possibilities offered by the experiment facility, many efforts are necessary to adapt the facility parameters in order to optimize the experiment procedure. The Microgravity User Support Centre (MUSC) at DLR in Cologne supports the investigators in these tasks of experiment preparation by operating the engineering model of the PCF and by the evaluation of the experimental data. The preparatory experiments and some gained results are given in this paper. During the mission phase, the investigators will have the ability to control the performance of their space experiments by analysing telemetry data of the facility and video pictures taken from the reaction chambers of their experiments. If requested, actual experiment parameters may be changed by issuing telecommand requests. The necessary tools are being developed by MUSC and will be provided for use by the investigators supported by the MUSC team. The operations concept during the mission and the processing of data with special emphasis on video picture processing are described.