Fig. 4. Concept of experimental operation of the SFU platform. cells will be capabale of supplying average total power up to 800 W throughout a mission period. About 60% of the total power can be used by experiments which are contained in the six pay load units. A small amount of energy required for actuators or low-power electronics packages mounted on the external structure will be available from the bus electrical power supply. An experiment requiring more electrical power than this standard has to provide a special power supply as a part of its own equipments. In this case the heat rejection required due to this power consumption is also the responsibility of the experiment. At present, a solar array to generate several kilowatts is being studied for a pay load of the SFU. Control and Data Management The control and data management subsystem (CDMS) of the SFU system is divided into two parts to be located separately in the SFU platform and the Space Shuttle orbiter. The fraction on board the orbiter will be called STS terminal, while the main part of the system on board the SFU platform will be simply called CDMS. Figure 4 shows the general idea of the system operation. The function of the STS terminal is the interface of the SFU system including experiments and the operator. The main data flow from the SFU platform will be passed by the CDMS of the STS to the ground investigators. The STS terminal will pick up necessary data to display them to the operator. If no flight operator is required for a mission, the STS terminal will not be carried in the orbiter, but will be used by the ground operator and experiment investigators. The operators can initialize each experiment and interact with it by changing the parameters used in the software program of CDMS of the SFU platform. A television camera will be installed on the platform to monitor the external configuration, but the image will be updated at an interval of 5 sec or longer.
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