Mission centre PCDF

Facility Support Centre (FSC)

In the frame of the ISS Project, the B.USOC will be a Facility Support Centre (FSC) for the Protein Crystallisation Diagnostics Facility (PCDF) in the European Drawer Rack (EDR) in the Columbus Payload Facility.

The European Drawer Rack provides a flexible experiment carrier for a large variety of scientific disciplines, and provides the accommodation and resources to experiment modules housed within standardised drawers and lockers called International Subrack Interface Standard (ISIS) drawers and ISS Lockers.

This approach allows a quick turn-around capability, and provides increased flight opportunities for the user community wishing to fly payloads that do not require a complete rack. Currently, the European Drawer Rack facility can accommodate up to 3 drawers, and up to 4 lockers.

The overall design of the facility is optimised for the parallel accommodation of three to four payloads, i.e. an average payload size of 2drawers/lockers, but both larger and smaller payloads may be accommodated.

The resource management covers the monitoring of resource allocations to individual payloads, but is not intended to perform dynamic resource management and/or process control for individual experiments.

It is assumed that the payloads will have their own intelligence and processing capability. Only in exceptional circumstances may a limited process control capability be provided to payloads. The EDR including a first set of drawers and lockers will be launched with the Columbus Laboratory.

Responsibility

• A Facility Support Centre (FSC) is delegated the responsibility (by ESA) for a sub-rack payload or for particular functions of a payload on board the Space Station.
• This differs from a Facility Responsible Centre (FRC), which is delegated the overall responsibility for a payload. Its functions focus on payload systems aspects and are related to all phases of payload operations, i.e. pre-flight activities, in-flight operation and post-flight activities.