The focus of the joint project BECCAL-I (Bose-Einstein Condensate and Cold Atom Lab), funded by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), is the investigation of experiment opportunities and technological prerequisites for experiments with Bose-Einstein Condensates on board of the International Space Station (ISS). Within the bilateral project between DLR and NASA, the design of a facility for atom optical experiments will be developed based on the existing experiments MAIUS and CAL. Due to the continuous microgravity environment, this facility allows experiments in a range from basic physics to preliminary studies for earth observation applications.

Since the continuous microgravity environment and the limitations of a space platform require continued miniaturization and automation of the experiment components, the Institute of Microelectronic Systems is working on optimizing experiment control and evaluation. The focus is on a high integration of control and evaluation tasks as well as the acceleration of computation intensive algorithms using FPGAs.