Many microgravity experiments require very low levels of residual acceleration that cannot be achieved on the international Space Station due to vibration induced by people and machinery. A vibration isolation system is then usually devised between the experiments and the space station to obtain desired accelerations at the experiment level. The very low frequency threshold required by the isolation specifications makes passive solutions for the isolation difficult to implement, owing to the practical impossibility to achieve high values of compliance of the elastic suspension, particularly when the forces exchanged between the suspended object (flotor) and the supporting structure (stator) are not very low. Furthermore, the unavoidable connections of uncertain characteristics between flotor and rotor make the problem even more difficult to be addressed. Disturbance reduction can be performed by means of active vibration isolation, based on magnetic suspension technology acting both at rack and at scientific experiment levels. The stiffness and damping of the active suspension can be tuned by the control loop to minimize the acceleration of the payload.
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