platform characteristics and user-related interfaces are shown in Figure 3.2-2 [7] The obvious advantage of the Eureca platform is that it provides much of the services needed for a Powersat experiment (i.e. power, thermal, mechanical, telemetry etc.). This would allow the Powersat program to focus almost exclusively on the experiment apparatus, avoiding the need to build a spacecraft bus. The other important advantage of Eureca is that it is a funded program scheduled for launch. All that would be necessary would be to fund the demonstrator development itself. It is important to note, however, that Eureca is optimised to support continuous, and long-duration experiments. As a result, experiment priority is generally given to long duration experiments that need continuous amounts of 1owf power (typically 20-50 W) and very low microgravity conditions (i.e. 10 3 to 10 5 g). As Eureca has not yet flown, and future flights are at a premium, opportunities for short-term and potentially disruptive Powersat experiments that last only a few hours or days and consume high power demands, will be limited. High power/short duration experiments are not necessarily precluded from being flown, though it is more a question of which experiments have higher priority. Further, the Eureca platform is capable of delivering high power levels for a short period of time (i.e. hours). For example, on Eureca-1, the Automatic Mirror Furnace will require around 500 W of power and the RIT ion thruster will consume some 440 W of power during the short periods when these units are being used. [8] Potentially, a Powersat experiment would be able to use nearly all of the full 1.5 kW of peak user power available. This level of power would be more than adequate for a Powersat demonstrator, as will be discussed later.
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