The Space Climatic Facility (SCF) is an experimental apparatus built in 2006 at the Frascati National Laboratory of INFN to study the thermal thrusts acting on the LAGEOS I and II satellites and to perform integrated thermal and optical characterization of retro-reflector (CCR) arrays for laser ranging. The latter include the new LARES satellite, whose main scientific goal is to improve the measurement accuracy of the frame dragging of the Earth (Lense-Thirring effect) predicted by General Relativity and reach a relative accuracy of the order of 1%. The SCF is also devoted to make the same tests on CCR arrays deployed on GNSS constellations (especially on GALILEO) within an approved INFN experiment, ETRUSCO. The SCF is a cylindrical cryostat where a realistic space environment is established in terms of pressure (10-6-10-7 mbar), temperature (down to 77 K) and e.m. radiation (Sun simulator and infrared Earth simulator). Thermal simulations are well advanced and laser-optical simulations are making good progress.
D. et al. (Fri,) studied this question.