Last week, at ESA's 46th parabolic flight campaign in Bordeaux, SSC engineers performed pre-cursor flights of the XRMON-Foam experiment module and also had the opportunity to experience microgravity themselves. SSC's three flights were very successful, with nominal processing of all six samples/furnaces, and gave important information about the XRMON-Foam for its coming flight on SSC's MASER 11 rocket next year. The scientific team from the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin is very satisfied. The test flights took place on 13-15 November and were performed from the Bordeaux-Merignac airport on a NOVESPACE owned Airbus A-300 modified for parabolic flights. The airplane followed a parabolic flight path giving approximately 20 seconds of low gravity (less than ±50mG) during each parabola.One flight includes normally 30 parabolas and one campaign contains 3 flights. The XRMON-Foam experiment module is developed by SSC, under a contract from ESA, and will fly on the sounding rocket MASER 11 in spring 2008. The purpose of the experiment is to, by X-ray, in-situ observe the foaming process of an aluminium alloy under microgravity in a thermally controlled furnace. The experiment container includes an experiment furnace, in which an Al sample is melted. The sample contains Ti particles with hydrogen, blowing agents, which starts the foaming process. The furnace temperature is controlled during the heating, foaming and solidification process. The furnace is heated by a coil of resistive wire and is cooled by a forced air-flow in order to solidify the sample before the end of microgravity. High requirements on image contrast and resolution pose special demands i.e. X-ray transparency on the selection of materials and technologies. The diagnostic X-ray system consists of a microfocus X-ray source, a CMOS high-resolution digital x-ray detector and an image acquisition computer. Images acquired during the microgravity phase will be stored on a fast solid state memory onboard. The purposes of the parabolic flight are both to perform scientific experiments and to perform precursor test in order to select sample alloy and tune processing parameters for the rocket flight. The XRMON is considered to be a frequent flyer by ESA and is, with a new experiment, one of the candidates for MAXUS 8.
