The OSTA-2 payload was the first in a series of planned orbital investigations of materials processing in space. The OSTA-2 comprised the Materials Experiments Assembly (MEA), developed and managed by the Marshall Center, and the Materialwissenschaftliche Autonome Experiments unter Schwerelosigkeit (MAUS), developed by the German Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT). The MEA was a desk-size package carrying two experiment furnaces and an acoustic levitator; each was contained inside individual experiment containers. The experiments were vapor growth of alloy-type semiconductor crystals, liquid phase miscibility gap materials, and containerless processing of glass-forming melts. The MAUS consisted of three instruments; each was contained in a get-away-special (GAS) canister. Each cylindrical canister carried an experiment furnace, which was thermally insulated, and had its own service module. The MAUS experiments were two metallic dispersions and a solidification front.
