The mechanical ground support equipment for the AIV and calibration of the AGILE integrated payload

AGILE is an ASI (Italian Space Agency) Small Space Mission for high energy astrophysics in the range 30 MeV - 50 GeV which is planned to be launched in 2005. Mechanical equipments are required for the Assembly, Integration and Verification (AIV) of the various subsystems together, forming the Payload complement. Furthermore, the calibration of the AGILE's performances requires to test with a beam line and with discrete X and γ ray sources the instrument response as a function of the energy of the incoming photons and particles and of their inclination with respect to the instrument axis. These AIV and Calibration activities lead to require an ad hoc Mechanical Ground Support Equipment (MGSE) which is able to move the instrument up and down, left and right as well as to rotate the instrument around the vertical axes and to tilt it by an angle between 0 and 180° with reference to the direction of the beam. We present here the MGSE we have designed in order to provide these functionalities with the required performances, and taking into account the working environment of the AIV and calibration sites.