Musician Jeff Wayne behind ESA's Solar Simulator

Musician Jeff Wayne, composer of the classic album version of The War of the Worlds (video), encountering a real-life equivalent of a heat-ray generator during a tour of ESA’s technical heart.

In science fiction writer H.G. Wells' tale of alien invasion, martians used heat rays to fight their way across Victorian England.

This is a rear view of ESA’s largest solar simulator, which uses 19 IMAX-class xenon lamps to cast a concentrated beam of sunshine into Europe’s largest vacuum chamber: the Large Space Simulator (LSS), at the ESTEC Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Satellites sit inside the chamber for weeks at a time, in the simulated vacuum and temperature extremes of space, including the unfiltered sunlight of Earth orbit, or, with modifications, as experienced around Venus or Mercury.

A long-time space enthusiast, Jeff Wayne took the opportunity to tour ESTEC on 13 October, taking a break from preparing for the live arena version of his musical show in Amsterdam, the last ever in the Netherlands, on 16 December.

ESA Mirror array in Large Space Simulator

Credit: ESA-A. Le Floc'h

This vast enclosure, made to appear larger still by an array of mirrors at its end, is ESA's Large Space Simulator.

Europe's largest vacuum chamber, the LSS subjects entire satellites to space-like conditions ahead of launch.

This 15 m-high and 10 m-diameter chamber is cavernous enough to accommodate an upended double decker bus.

Visitors to this year's ESTEC Open Day will have the chance to see it for themselves.

Satellites are lowered down through a topside hatch. Once the top and side hatches are sealed, high-performance pumps create a vacuum a billion times lower than standard sea level atmosphere, held for weeks at a time during test runs.

ESA BepiColombo in ESTEC's LSS

Credit: ESA

The 121-segment mirror array seen in the image reflects simulated sunlight into the chamber, at the same time as the walls are pumped full of –190°C liquid nitrogen, together recreating the extreme thermal conditions prevailing in orbit.

Embedded sensors and measurement devices check whether a mission's thermal engineers have done their job well, and if the test satellite maintains an acceptable internal temperature range without buckling or other unwanted temperature-driven effects.

The LSS, seen here during a past refurbishment, is an essential part of ESA's Test Centre in the Netherlands, the largest facility of its kind in Europe, providing a complete suite of equipment for all aspects of satellite testing under a single roof.