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Facility Responsible Centre for the European
Fluid Sciences Laboratory
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The European Space Agency, which oversees Europe’s use of the ISS, designated Telespazio as the Facility Responsible Centre for the Fluid Sciences Laboratory and other small European payloads (ALTCRISS, SODI, ALTEA SHIELD, FASTER and TRITEL) for the entire life cycle of the ISS programme (at least until 2020). The company operates as the FRC from its premises in Naples.
This came about as a result of the experience gained by the MARS research centre in managing scientific payloads on board space platforms (sounding rockets, Foton, STS) over a period of nearly twenty years, and was ratified in 1998 when ESA's Manned Space Programme Board decided to adopt a decentralised infrastructure for payload operations on board the ISS and began to rely on USOCs. USOCs are the points of access to the system, or the stations from which it is possible to get “on board” the space station. Nine countries in Europe have a USOC. Apart from Italy, similar initiatives have been launched by Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark and Norway.
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In its capacity as FRC, Telespazio is responsible for running the Fluid Science Laboratory during operations on board the ISS, and is required to co-ordinate all the pre-mission activities, prepare the experiments and promote the scientific use of the facility to potential customers. For this reason, the company’s plant in Naples houses the FSL Engineering Model in its clean room. This is effectively a twin to the equipment installed in the Columbus module and is also used for troubleshooting.
Operators can check the progress of experiments remotely from the ground (known as telescience), or fully and semi-automatically from the control room, distributing the scientific data directly to the user at the UHB, which is connected via VPN.
User support allows the user (i.e. the scientist that designed the experiment) to familiarise himself with the functions and capabilities of the equipment. It also helps him develop usage procedures, assists in training the crew in the steps to be taken on board, calibrates the samples to be processed and archives the relevant data.
This has all been made possible thanks to Telespazio’s role as FRC, which means it is now part of a European network connecting all the ground centres that provide support to the operations on Columbus. USOCs are co-ordinated centrally by the Columbus Control Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen, near Munich, Germany, which assembles and consolidates inputs, in real-time and near-real-time, from all the payload operations teams. The Columbus Control Centre is the European interface with the other international partners and is therefore in direct communication with the Mission Control Centre, Houston (MCC-H), the Payload Operations Integration Centre (POIC) and the Mission Control Centre, Moscow (MCC-M).
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