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The Turin Astronomical Observatory recently completed construction in Altec, Turin, of, Italy, a new Optical Payload System (OPSys) facility for tests of contamination sensitive optical space flight instruments. The facility is specially tailored for tests on solar instruments like coronagraphs. The test facility includes a clean room for instrument assembly and a relatively large (4.e+3 liters) optical test and calibration vacuum chamber. After vacuum conditioning, the chamber will hace an ultimate pressure of 1.e‐7 torr. The Space Optics Calibration Chamber (SPOCC) consists of a test section with a vacuum‐ compatible motorized optical bench, and of a pipeline section with a solar simulator at the opposite end of the optical bench hosting the instrumentation under tests. The solar simulator is an off‐axis parabolic mirror collimating the light from the source with the solar angular divergence. This presentation will describe the SPOCC's vacuum system and optical design, and the post‐flight stray‐light tests to be carried out on the Sounding‐rocket Experiment (SCORE). This sub‐orbital coronagraph is the prototype of the METIS coronagraph for the ESA Solar Orbital mission. Solar Orbiter closest perihelion is one‐third the Sun‐Earth distances. The plans will be illustrated for testing METIS simulating in SPOCC the coronagraph observing conditions from the Solar Orbiter perihelion.
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