New Inertial Laboratory

19 July 2021

The Institute of Space Technology and Space Applications (ISTA) has set up a new high-tech 3-Axis

Motion Simulator with an integrated thermal chamber cooled by high pressure CO2 (see picture below).

With a position accuracy better than ±2 arcsec and a rate range up to ±1000 deg/s all IMU

classes, i.e. from the MEMS-grade until the navigation grade, can be high accurate calibrated.

The temperature chamber has temperature range between -60 C° and +100 C° provides, that

can cover all environment situation and thus determine the temperature dependent errors,

such bias or scale factor errors due to the temperature. For the calibration of the accelerometer

triad the reference signal, i.e., the reference gravity has been measured with an accuracy of 8 µGal (~8.10^-7 m/s²).

For other application such as north finding techniques the absolute north direction has been measured with 1 mgon accuracy.

A predefine calibration routines, such as Six-Position-Static test or turn rates, are available in LabView-Software package incorporating an automatic report generator allows a flexible calibration procedure.