Spanish User Support and Operations Centre
The Spanish User Support and Operations Centre (E-USOC) has assisted in the preparation, in-flight and post-flight operations of space experiments in 2008.
This operations centre is part of the Higher Technical School of Aeronautical and Space Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM).
The centre provides technical and operational support to space experiments in the fields of fluid mechanics and material sciences. Furthermore, E-USOC develops software for operational displays and hosts the ESA Science Data Centre.
Their facilities consist of a control room, a clean room, a ground station for educational satellites and a laboratory for fluidics experiments.
E-USOC specialises in the experimental setting of the NASA Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) rack, mostly in the fields of fluidics and material sciences. E-USOC is in constant communication with NASA.
Examples of experiments operated by E-USOC are the Geophysical Fluid Flow under Microgravity (GeoFlow) is an ESA experiment that studies thermal convection to model Earth’s liquid core, and the Transparent Alloys project to study the melting-solidification processes in plastics.