Our experiment will be contained in a aluminium box properly insulated with foam panels. The housing has to withstand thermal and mechanical loads during the various mission phases. The box structure is basically a sandwich built with foam core and aluminium skins. The external aluminium case provides a first thermal and mechanical protection as well as an interface for experiment mounting on the payload gondola. The internal aluminium case provides support for internal components: battery pack and an electronic board.

Aluminium boxes are built with panels connected with “L-shaped” corners and rivets. Foam panels are placed in between and glued to the metal cases.

Detailed CAD drawings of the experiment box and attachment system are shown in the following figures. Please note that the dimensions reported in drawings slightly differ from actual total size of the box because they do not include corners and rivets thickness.

The box is provided with brackets on the 4 sides. All of them are required to attach the experiment to  calibration devices, mainly tilt and rate table. Connection to the payload gondola is assured by two beams placed under the experiment box.

Two sets of mounting bar have been developed to match the gondola rails in both side of the gondola, the larger and the narrower (320 – 375 mm).

Considering the thickness of rivets and “L-shaped” corners, the overall experiment dimension is 21x21x17 cm. The final mass is 3300 g.

More details about experiment mass budget in the section "Mass & Power Budget".

FEM structural analysis demonstrates that the experiment box can withstand to all loadings that it will encounter during the flight. The worst case mechanical load is encountered when the parachute opens, and the experiment will be loaded with 10 g along the Z-axis. The situation has been simulated using FEM software. The model is a box made of sandwich panels where the core has no bending stiffness; The constrains are no rotation and no translation for all the nodes in the bottom panel. The results are shown below:

The maximum total translation is 0.1 µm for the nodes that are in the centre of the top panel. Stresses also are low, not exceeding 36 kPa, well below the yield stress of the aluminium.

Loads due to thermal gradient has been evaluated, particularly stresses generated on constrains (where the box is connected with the payload gondola) by shrinks of the experiment box as the temperature decrease considerably. However, the values are so low that are not a reason of concern.