Long-duration exposure facility - A new capability for space testing and basic research

The reusable Long-Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), which can accommodate experiments requiring large exposure surface areas, large volumes and/or massive hardware, offers to researchers a new inexpensive opportunity to conduct extended technology and basic research testing in the space environment. Many researchers with interest varying from medical research to astrophysics research will have their experiments performed in the 80 large experiment trays on the first LDEF flight. This paper describes the LDEF and a number of experiments now being developed for the first mission. In particular, this paper illustrates the value of the LDEF features which allow the return of the experiment hardware and repeated flights.