Electric control system for microgravity fluid experiment on SZ-4 spaceship

This paper presents a new electric control system (ECS) with small size, light weight and low-power consumption for the microgravity fluid experiment of drop Marangoni migration on SZ-4 spaceship, a test module of the manned space mission of China. The ECS is designed as a key part to set up and maintain a suitable temperature gradient field for microgravity fluid experiment. It acquires, stores and transmits the experiment data, and acts as an interface keeping contact between the experiment device and a remote-terminal in the return capsule. In addition, the ECS is an executing unit to control the whole space experiment and to change the working modes of the experiment through commands from the ground, or by prestored program in EEPROM. The ECS, presented in this work, has run in-orbit successfully to operate the microgravity fluid experiment on SZ-4 and its performance is shown in the experiment results in space.