Materials International Space Station Experiment - MISSE-7

MISSE-7

The seventh set of MISSE experiments was located on ExPRESS Logistics Carrier 2. They were brought to the station in November 2009 aboard mission STS-129.

MISSE-7 is composed of two suitcase-sized Passive Experiment Containers (PECs), identified as MISSE 7A and MISSE 7B. Once installed in the exterior of ISS by space walking astronauts, the PECs were opened. The orientation of MISSE 7A was space facing/Earth facing while MISSE 7B faced forward/backward relative to the ISS orbit. Both MISSE 7A and MISSE 7B contained active and passive experiments. Passive experiments are designed for pre- and post-flight evaluation in ground-based laboratories. Being a first in the MISSE program, active experiments are designed to interface with the power and communication systems on ISS allowing data to be transmitted back to Earth.

MISSE-7 also contained experiments mounted to its ExPA base. These experiments included SpaceCube which was developed by engineers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and is a reconfigurable, high-performance system based on Xilinx's Virtex-4 commercial FPGAs designed for spaceflight applications requiring compute intensive on-board processing. The MISSE-7 SpaceCube’s purpose was to serve as an “on-orbit” test-bed for demonstrating “radiation hardened by software” program execution and error detection and correction techniques that will help enable the use of commercial processing devices in space.

The Naval Research Laboratory handled primary responsibility for MISSE 7A, while the Air Force Research Laboratory, NASA, Boeing, other industry collaborators, and academia had experiments on MISSE 7B.

The two PECs were collected for return to Earth during the STS-134 mission.