Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab

The Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab (SAIL) is part of the Center for Space and Atmospheric Research (CSAR) and is located within the Physical Sciences Department of Embry-Riddle’s Daytona Beach Campus. SAIL is card-access controlled and has approximately 3,000 square feet of space, separated into two rooms of about 1,500 square feet each.

The first room houses the two plasma chambers, desk space and computer stations for students pursuing experimental or plasma modeling work.

The second room houses the electronics and other hardware development area, along with student space with workstations to do the design and computational analysis of rocket/satellite flight data. There is a conference table setup with a projector and camera for internet-based 180° C for objects up to 6U CubeSat in size. The chamber is used for meticulous, temperature-based calibration of instruments and thermal bakeout of flight instruments.

All flight hardware development is done in an ESD safe zone that is about 300 square feet in size. The area has two comprehensively equipped electronics workbenches for surface-mount assembly and testing of printed circuit boards.

SAIL also has a two-meter diameter large Helmholtz cage and a 45-centimeter diameter small Helmholtz cage, along with a foot-long Zero Gauss Chamber for calibration of magnetometers as well as actuation and testing of the magnetic attitude determination and control system of CubeSats up to 6U in size.

There is a mechanical hardware building capability with various tools (metal lathe, drill press, milling machine, etc.) and multiple hardtop benches for assembly of rocket flight hardware conferences.

SAIL has a computer-controlled environmental chamber capable of thermal cycling from -70° C to +175° C.

The lab also has the following items:

• A one cubic meter Halogen LED-based solar chamber for hands-off power characterization of up to 6U CubeSats.
• A spin table capable of testing rocket boom deployment on sounding rockets up to a five-hertz spin rate.
• A two cubic meter dark chamber for optical characterization of CubeSats to aid in post-flight space situational awareness observations from the ground.