After a near flawless three-day flight in space, the Wake Shield Facility was recovered by the shuttle Columbia last night. During its flight, Wake Shield Facility successfully completed its run of seven epitaxial growth experiments and a number of cooperative experiments. Today, Wake Shield Facility will again be unberthed to perform another of those cooperative experiments, this one called AOProc, or Atomic Oxygen Processing experiment. AOProc is an experiment that takes advantage of the naturally occurring atomic oxygen in low Earth orbit to produce aluminum oxide films.
Atomic oxygen is difficult to produce on Earth, yet is readily available on orbit.
Rather than activating the growth process through heat, such as in molecular beam epitaxy, AOProc hope to demonstrate an activation process based on energy created by the speed of oxygen atoms as they combine with aluminum on a cold substrated. The AOProc experiment utilizes the Wake Shield Facility while on Columbia's robot arm. The AOProc experiment will take four hours to complete, with the actual growhth process taking somewhat less than one hour.