AVS 53rd International Symposium
    Vacuum Technology Wednesday Sessions
       Session VT-WeA

Paper VT-WeA3
Bayard-Alpert Gauges for Space Research: Techniques and Results

Wednesday, November 15, 2006, 2:40 pm, Room 2000

Session: Space-based Vacuum Applications and Instrumentation; Panel Discussion on Vacuum Science and Technology
Presenter: J.H. Clemmons, The Aerospace Corporation
Correspondent: Click to Email
Two variants on a common spaceborne ionization gauge design are discussed. The miniature, commercially-available sensors used to minimize the required spacecraft resources are described. Several special features of the controller are demanded by scientific use in space, including high-precision, high-rate sampling, DC filament regulation, and space compatibility, are presented and discussed. The variant used for suborbital flights, which employs 1 kHz sampling and an accommodation chamber designed to have a response function between that of a planar aperture and a pitot tube, as well as results from several flights, are presented. The variant used for orbital flights, which features a more traditional accommodation chamber with a planar aperture and high-reliability electronics, as well as results taken from about one year of data collection, are presented. A special mode of the instruments, designed to provide crude composition information, is also discussed and evaluated.