Thermal Insulation of Autonomous Experiment Containers in Pressurized Environments during Pre-launch Onstallation

A high insulating container has been built based on Dewar and Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI) technology. The overall thermal conductivity is less than 0.3 mWm^-1K^-1 for an environmental temperature of 22 °C and an internal temperature of 0 °C (ref. 1). The container has been developed to accommodate the Biofilm experiment that should have been executed in orbit during the FOTON M1 mission in October 2002. The extreme high thermal insulation was required because of the required sample temperature (below 10 °C) during the period of access before launch (4.5 days). Unfortunately FOTON crashed during launch, 30 seconds after take-of because of booster malfunctioning. This container may be especially useful for automated, small biological, medical and life science microgravity experiments.