A functional test bed for electrostatic space accelerometers

Accelerometers for space geodesy require a performance and functional check-out on ground, before their lunch. The paper presents the first steps in the design of an emulator for the inertial reference system of the LISA mission, one of the recent most demanding science mission in terms of the monitoring and compensation of the non-gravitational forces acting on the payload. The approach proposed is based on a set of variable capacitors to emulate the space traveling gravitational reference system. In the paper, a design outline is shown and the feasibility of the approach discussed together with the tests performed on the actuators that have led to their choice.