Facilities

The sub-department is located in an historic building situated within the University of Oxford's Science Area and near the town centre. It can be conveniently reached by both road and rail. The challenge over the past 25 years has been to turn a Victorian building into a modern, well-equippped laboratory, and this has been achieved by extensive modifications to both the structure and the layout of the building. The resulting changes have produced a compact laboratory incorporating all the facilities and services needed to support the design, development and testing of space instrumentation.

Fig 1: Diagram of ground floor of AOPP. For a more detailed map, click here

The schematic shown in Fig 1 provides an overview of the facilities and services provided on-site. The department's large test and calibration facilities, the 2.2 metre facility and the 1.6 metre facility, each housing thermal vacuum chambers, are supported by a common control room. Small, but well equipped mechanical and electronic workshops are located close-by and provide the manufacturing and maintenance expertise needed to maintain and re-configure the thermal vacuum chambers. The workshops are also used in the manufacture and integration of space instrumentation at all levels, from working prototype to qualified flight hardware.

In close proximity to both the workshops and test facilities are the department's clean vibration test facility and clean assembly area. The latter is used to assemble and test sub-systems and small instruments. The inter-connected nature of the facilities and services allows for rapid prototyping, modification and repair, with a minimum of transfer of flight hardware off-site.

Facilities for coating and photofabrication are also available from within the Physics Department and have been used extensively in the fabrication of flight hardware. In particular, low-thermal conductivity cryogenic harnesses for detector arrays have been successfully manufactured for several projects, using photofabrication techniques.