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The Large Clean Circular Chamber “Baldrick” provides a ‘clean’ flat-bottomed testbed for astrobiological exposure experiments to extreme environments, such as variable vacuum pressure, temperature and UV simulated environments. The chamber was purchased for the International Bilateral Fund: COSPAR PPP project awarded to AstrobiologyOU in 2023.
Baldrick is a clean circular chamber with a flat base. It is 60 cm in diameter and 20 cm tall. It benefits from a large spring-loaded top lid opening the full diameter of the chamber. The top lid hosts various portholes, ideal for UV illumination, including 4 small (CF63 68 mm), and one large (CF200 197 mm). The chamber wall is equipped with five KF50 ports for various feedthroughs. It can operate at pressures down to 10-5 mbar, at temperatures between -100 °C and +200 °C. The chamber has a rolling frame to align three deuterium UV light sources over three of the four top CF63 VPZL-450Q viewports. Cryogenic feedthroughs allow for the circulation of liquid nitrogen through a large 400 mm diameter Copper cold plate, and electronic feedthroughs allow for multiple thermocouples.
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Mirandah Ackley (Freie Universität Berlin PhD student) with her frozen samples to expose to UV, low temperature and low pressure within the Baldrick chamber
| Diameter | 0.6 m |
| Height | 0.2 m |
| Pressure | 10-5 mbar – 1000 mbar |
| Temperature | -100°C – +200°C |
The Large Clean Circular Chamber “Baldrick” has:
2023-25: IBF COSPAR PPP project – a project to develop a new probabilistic approach to Planetary Protection. The chamber has been used to investigate the survival of microorganisms collected from clean rooms to vacuum ± low temperature ± UV sterilisation conditions.
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