Laboratories and Facilities

Integration Laboratory

The integration laboratory enables the realisation of projects with flight hardware. Depending on the scientific issue with the instruments on board and the destination of the spacecraft, the flight missions are assembled with varying degrees of purity.

Planetary Infrastructure Laboratory

About the lab: For a successful human spaceflight strategy, resources such as water, oxygen, food and also rocket propellants, energy, construction materials for space habitats and many different types of consumables must be generated and appropriately recycled within future planetary or interplanetary outposts.

Landing and Mobility Test Facility

The Institute of Space Systems has deployed and operates a facility – the Landing & Mobility Test Facility (LAMA) – to test landing vehicles and exploration rovers. Objectives are to determine and to investigate experimentally on system level the dynamic behaviour of planetary vehicles, being either rovers or landers in their very final landing phase at touchdown when ground contact occurs.

Concurrent Engineering Facility

Concurrent Engineering is a process focussed on optimising engineering design cycles, which complements and partially replaces the traditional sequential design-flow by integrating multidisciplinary teams that work collectively and in parallel, at the same site, with the objective of performing the design in the most efficient and consistent way as possible, right from the beginning.

Cryogenic Laboratory

The cryo lab enables experiments and tests to be carried out with cryogenic liquids. It is particularly suitable for handling liquid hydrogen, liquid methane and liquid oxygen. These cryogenic media are used as propellants in space travel.

Digital Cleanroom

Welcome to the Digital Cleanroom in Bremen, a key project of the Cooperants initiative that aims to bring space visions to life in an innovative and digitally transformed environment. This unique playground has been created to bring together project partners from different areas of industry and research in one place, overcoming barriers of traditional cleanrooms.

CAT – Core Avionics Testbed

The Core Avionics Testbed (CAT) is a test environment for the functional verification of spacecraft at system and subsystem level. The focus is on the core avionics, which consists of the power supply system, the data processing system and the communication system.

EMV-Laboratory

In order to find out whether electronic or electrical systems and components function satisfactorily in a certain electromagnetic environment, various conditions can be simulated in the EMC test laboratory of the DLR Institute of Space Systems in Bremen and the emission of electromagnetic interference can be determined with the help of emission measurements.

Vibration Test Facilities

Space structures are exposed to intense, quasi-static and dynamically mechanical accelerations, particularly during launch. The test laboratory is responsible for the qualification of components and systems for space by carrying out simulations of the vibrations experienced during the launch, as well as by verifying analytical calculations for the structures and checking the results of finite-element calculations.

Pyroshock Testing

Space structures are exposed to pyroshocks and other similar shocklike events during launch and whilst in operation, for example when triggering the separation mechanism with explosive bolts and pyrotechnic fasteners. The pyroshock test facilities enable space components and systems to be qualified during simulations of intense transient excitation caused by pyrotechnic ignitions (pyroshocks).

UHV Test Facility

The Ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) facility researches the outgassing of materials or components that could be used in space or in vacuum facilities. It complements the micro-VCM facility, which is only able to conduct irreversible tests on individual materials. Examples of components that have been tested are electrical motors, circuit boards, heaters and camera lenses.

Micro-VCM Testing

All materials outgas as soon as they are exposed to a vacuum. Outgassing greatly depends on the material and its conditioning, the operating temperature and the time spent in vacuum. For space applications, outgassing can lead to serious problems, particularly when part of the released gas condenses onto an adjacent surface.

Space Simulation Facility

The space simulation facility conducts thermal vacuum testing of both individual components and overall systems for space applications.

Solar Simulation Chamber

The solar simulation chamber serves for thermal vacuum testing of both individual components and overall systems for space applications. The environmental conditions that will be encountered in space, such as high vacuum, the cold temperature in space and solar radiation, can all be recreated during these simulations.

Complex Irradiation Facility (CIF)

The Complex Irradiation Facility (CIF) is used for experimental research into the degradation of materials under simulated space radiation conditions as those found beyond that of low Earth orbits.

Climate Test Facility

The climate test simulates environmental influences on a test object under ambient pressures. One feature of this is the variability of the temperature and humidity over time.

Thermo-optical parameter testing

The term "thermo-optical parameters" is used in space travel to summarize two optical properties of surfaces whose relationship to each other significantly determines the thermal properties of the surface under space conditions.

HiLT – Hardware-in-the-Loop Technology Laboratory

Lab for the development, real-time simulation, test, and verification of embedded systems required for GNC systems.

FACE – Facility for Attitude Control Experiments

Air bearing table simulating the attitude motion of a satellite in space.

TRON – Testbed for Robotic Optical Navigation

Laboratory to simulate scenes for testing optical navigation systems

TEAMS – Test Environment for Applications of Multiple Spacecraft

Testbed to simulate frictionless motion of multiple vehicles in space for testing of formation flying and rendez-vous and docking.

STARS Laboratory

Rotation table to stimulate inertial sensors augmented with a GPS signal simulator to stimulate GPS receivers.

Electronic Laboratory

The electronics development laboratory hosts several ultra-modern measuring workstations. With regard to metrological capabilities, the laboratory's key competencies lie within the field of telecommunications and high-frequency technology.

3D Print Laboratory

The 3D printing laboratory was put into operation in 2021 by the System Development and Project Office and System Analysis Space Segment departments. As part of the EDEN initiative, rockwool holders and complex filter structures are produced in the 3D printing laboratory, for example for the MEPA project (mobile deployable plant cultivation system).