Wood-built MFSA for magnetic testing

Pictured here testing Rosetta, the Magnetic Field Simulation Facility (MFSA) of Germany’s IABG, in Ottobrunn near Munich, was more recently employed for testing the magnetic performance of the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft. The MFSA's buildings are made entirely from wood, avoiding steel beams or floors, and it is set in a forest far from population centres or power lines to minimise electromagnetic interference. The facility is fitted with very large magnetic coils to ‘null’ Earth’s magnetic field across a large volume of several cubic metres. The test team then operated the spacecraft in the same way it will run in space, for periods of up to 15,000 seconds - several hours - to get a good map of the magnetic field prevailing near the test masses, and how it varies over time.