Development and Testing of a Low Temperature/Low Vibration Cooling System for Space Application

Since some years, an increasing number of studies are based on spaceborne low temperature focal planes. Thus a specific development was conduced to verify a concept of a Low Temperature / Low Vibration Cooling System. This development is based on a mock-up.

This mock-up consist in a cooling system based on a cryostat using mechanical coolers with an active control of the induced vibrations, mounted on a elastomer isolator to minimise these microvibrations.

This mock-up was submitted to thermal testing of the cryostat and to characterisation of the level of induced vibrations.

This development allowed to validate the concept that demonstrated good performances and the reliability of the thermal and mechanical models that predicted the tests results with a high accuracy.