Artur Jurkowski from KP Labs' Thermal and Mechanical Engineering Department explains how the Polish aerospace firm tests its data processing unit to ensure it can survive in space.
Once dependent on black coal mining, southwest Poland is now home to an aerospace cluster, one of Europe’s over 1,500 industrial clusters. Space technology company KP Labs has just launched its first satellite, one of the many technologies it developed as part of the Silesian Aviation Cluster.
KP Labs sent nanosatellite Intuition-1, and an onboard data processing unit called Leopard into space on Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Falcon 9 last year.
We spoke with Artur Jurkowski, the Head of KP Labs' Thermal and Mechanical Engineering Department about how they test their data processing unit to ensure it can survive in space.
"In space, the environment is quite different. We have no air and heat removal is much more difficult and we have reproduced such conditions on Earth with this machine.
"This chamber is a thermal vacuum chamber. It means that inside, we can generate a space-like environment.
"Several tests are important for our data processing unit. We are preparing functional testing. It means turning it on and off but sometimes in demanding temperature conditions for example -40 and +65, and even higher or lower temperatures.
"The second test we are performing is thermo cycling. It means we are driving our devices from -40 to 65 at really high speed.
"And then we are repeating such activities several times because in the low earth orbit where the satellite is cycling around the Earth, the temperature change is really rapid and it’s important to represent such conditions, changing conditions on the ground."
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