The European Retrievable Carrier (EURECA) was an unmanned 4.5-

tonne The tonne ( or ; symbol: t) is a unit of mass equal to 1000 kilograms. It is a non-SI unit accepted for use with SI. It is also referred to as a metric ton to distinguish it from the non-metric units of the short ton ( United State ...

satellite with 15 experiments. It was a

European Space Agency , owners = , headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France , coordinates = , spaceport = Guiana Space Centre , seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png , seal_size = 130px , image = Views in the Main Control Room (1205 ...

(ESA) mission and the acronym was derived from

Archimedes Archimedes of Syracuse (;; ) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists ...

' bathtub revelation " Eureka!". It was built by the German MBB-ERNO and had automatic material science cells as well as small telescopes for solar observation (including x-ray). It was launched 31 July 1992 by during STS-46, and placed into an orbit at an altitude of . EURECA was retrieved on 1 July 1993 by during

STS-57 STS-57 was a NASA Space Shuttle-Spacehab mission of that launched 21 June 1993 from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Crew Spacewalk * '' Low and Wisoff '' – EVA 1 * EVA 1 Start: 25 June 1993 * EVA 1 End: 25 June 1993 * Duration: 5 hours ...

and returned to Earth. It was designed to fly five times with different experiments but the following flights were cancelled. EURECA is one of the few unmanned space vehicles that have been returned to the Earth unharmed. It has been on display at the

Swiss Museum of Transport The Swiss Museum of Transport or Verkehrshaus der Schweiz (literally "Transportation House of Switzerland") in Lucerne opened in July 1959 and exhibits all forms of transport including trains, automobiles, ships and aircraft as well as communicati ...

Lucerne Lucerne ( , ; High Alemannic German, High Alemannic: ''Lozärn'') or Luzern ()Other languages: gsw, Lozärn, label=Lucerne German; it, Lucerna ; rm, Lucerna . is a city in central Switzerland, in the Languages of Switzerland, German-speaking po ...

since 2000.

Design

EURECA was made of high-strength carbon-fiber struts and

titanium Titanium is a chemical element with the symbol Ti and atomic number 22. Found in nature only as an oxide, it can be reduced to produce a lustrous transition metal with a silver color, low density, and high strength, resistant to corrosion in ...

nodal points joined together to form a framework of cubic elements. Thermal control on EURECA combined both active and passive heat transfer and radiation systems. Active heat transfer was achieved by means of a

freon Freon ( ) is a registered trademark of the Chemours Company and generic descriptor for a number of halocarbon products. They are stable, nonflammable, low toxicity gases or liquids which have generally been used as refrigerants and as aerosol prop ...

cooling loop which dissipated the thermal load through two radiators into space. The passive system made use of multilayer insulation blankets combined with electrical heaters. The electrical subsystem was powered by deployable and retractable solar arrays together with four 40 amp-hour nickel-cadmium batteries. When EURECA was in the Shuttle cargo bay, power was supplied by the Shuttle. The modular attitude and orbit control subsystem (AOCS) maintained attitude and spacecraft orientation and stabilization. An orbit transfer assembly, consisting of four thrusters, was used to boost EURECA to its operational attitude of and return it to a retrievable orbit of about . EURECA was three-axis stabilized by means of a magnetic torque assembly together with a nitrogen reaction control assembly (RCA). Data handling was carried out by EURECAs data handling subsystem (DHS) supported by telemetry and command subsystems providing the link to the ground station.

Experiments

EURECA consisted of 15 experiments: * Solution Growth Facility (SGF) (Belgium, Denmark, Norway) * Protein Crystallization Facility (PCF) (Germany) *

Exobiology Radiation Assembly Exobiology Radiation Assembly (ERA) was an experiment that investigated the biological effects of space radiation. An astrobiology mission developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), it took place aboard the European Retrievable Carrier (EURECA), ...

(ERA) (Germany) * Multi-Furnace Assembly (MFA) (Italy) * Automatic Mirror Furnace (AMF) (Germany) * Surface Forces Adhesion Instrument (SFA) (Italy) * High Precision Thermostat Instrument (HPT) (Germany) * Solar Constant and Variability Instrument (SOVA) (Belgium) * Solar Spectrum Instrument (SOSP) (France) * Occultation Radiometer Instrument (ORI) (Belgium) * Wide Angle Telescope for Cosmic Hard X-rays (WATCH) (Denmark) * Timeband Capture Cell Experiment (TICCE) (Great Britain) * Radio Frequency Ionization Thruster Assembly (RITA) (Germany) * Inter-Orbit Communications (IOC) (France/the Netherlands) * Advanced Solar Gallium Arsenide Array (ASGA) (Italy) The WATCH instrument observed Cosmic X-rays in an extremely wide field of view, a 65 degree range capable of observing 1/4 of the sky. The design is a Rotation Modulation Collimator, in which stripes of NaI(Tl) and CsI(Na) detectors make a phoswich.

Results

WATCH monitored about 25 X-rays sources over the whole sky over the course of the mission, as well as detecting 19 cosmic gamma ray bursts. Many of the gamma ray bursts were able to be localized to within 1 degree. In the summer of 2016, EURECA was transported to the

Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology The Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa, German acronym for ''Eidgenössische Materialprüfungs- und Forschungsanstalt'') is an interdisciplinary Swiss research institute for applied materials sciences and tech ...

(Empa) in Dübendorf near Zurich where X-ray scans of the satellite were taken. The goal was to find out how EURECA's 11-month exposure to space had affected its structure and selected experiments it carried. EURECA was then brought back to the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne and has since been exhibited in a new way, with both solar panels fully deployed for the first time.

Technical dat ...

- Comparable Japanese spacecraft 1995-1996

References

External links