Ground support equipment for scientific tests and calibration of the AGILE instrument

The AGILE satellite is designed to observe emission in the energy range from 30 MeV to 50 GeV from a variety of celestial objects such as Galactic sources, Active Galactic Nuclei, gamma ray bursts, solar flares and unidentified objects as well as diffuse emission. It is intended to be operational for a period of 3 years from the foreseen launch date of 2002. In the intervening time the instrument will proceed from the design phase, through the construction, test and calibration to the flight ready status. In order to support these activities a dedicated Ground Support Equipment (GSE), including both mechanical and electrical items will be required. Herein we describe the architecture of the GSE with particular reference to the items devoted to the scientific data acquisition, archiving and processing and to the control of the detector position in the calibration beam facility.