Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (Ariel) is the fourth medium-sized mission (M4) selected in the context of ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme and is scheduled for launch in 2029. Thermal control of the payload is based on a passive and active cooling approach. Passive cooling is achieved by a V-Groove shield system that takes advantage of the favourable thermal...
Out of nearly two thousand CubeSat missions that have taken place, less than ten have been designed to cultivate and sustain living organisms in-orbit whilst working with as strict thermal requirements as the AcubeSAT, developed under ESA Education's “Fly Your Satellite! 3 Programme” by SpaceDot. SpaceDot is a non-profit, volunteer, and interdisciplinary student team working on the 3U CubeSat...
Thermal analysis for CubeSats is a challenge caused by different factors. For instance, orbit parameters are not known until the very end of the development phase. On the other hand, thermal behaviour of a multimission platform can differ significantly from one mission to another. As part of the development of the CSUM's 12U platform, improvements to the thermal analysis process were required....
The models used to analyse the thermal performance of spacecraft are complex, and characterise states and behaviours of a spacecraft for all subsystems and at various levels of abstraction. Configuring thermal models is historically a technical and time-intensive process, requiring intimate knowledge of the specific model and sub-models, as well as the spacecraft, its mission and the physics...
In the frame of Arianespace mission analysis, thermal coupled loads analysis are needed to predict the thermal behavior of spacecraft on ground and during the flight. With the latest and upcoming launchers of VEGA-C and ARIANE 6 it was the occasion to update the technical specification for payload thermal models.
To introduce this new specification, a quick presentation of launcher (Ariane...
HENON (HEliospheric pioNeer for sOlar and interplanetary threats defeNce) and LUMIO (Lunar Meteoroid Impact Observer) missions are pioneering deep-space projects employing 12U CubeSat platforms. HENON aims to advance space weather forecasting by placing a CubeSat in a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the Earth, providing early warning signals for solar events. LUMIO, on the other hand,...
This paper reports on the degradation of thermo-optical properties of materials used in thermal and power functional surfaces due to lunar dust. A large set of solar cell coverglasses (CVG), radiator coatings such as Optical Solar Reflectors (OSR), Second Surface Mirrors (SSM), or white paints, as well as MLI outer layers are tested after deposit of Lunar Dust Simulant (LDS).
The solar...
PCM are materials selected for their high latent heat, which the phase transition (melting and solidifying) at the relevant temperature range is able to absorb and release a large amount of energy. They are usually stored in hermetically sealed container which is thermally coupled to the dissipative unit. Although already existing for a long time and used on several Space missions, PCM...
Heat capacitors are often used in space application to control temperatures during high transient heat loads or alternating hot/cold periods. Due to their purpose, they are characterized by high thermal inertia. In addition, in order to lower their mass (with respect for example to a similar solution made out completely of metal), they can use materials, such as Phase Change Materials (PCMs),...
This is a follow up to the presentation given at the ESTEW 2021, “Modelling of a polar lunar landing site ESATAN-TMS”. The focus of the presentation is on the thermal modelling of lunar South pole landing sites, with intermittent illumination conditions, applicable to upcoming ESA missions PROSPECT and Argonaut. For these, there is an interest to have a practical modelling of the lunar surface...
Development of aerobraking MLI and deployable flaps
EnVision, the upcoming medium class mission to Venus, will implement an aerobraking maneuver in the upper Venus atmosphere, in order to decrease velocity and reach its final mission orbit. In addition to the body of the satellite, it is intended to use dedicated aerobraking flaps, as extensions of the solar array assembly. During breaking,...
Night resilience is an important point in the thermal management of any vehicle in Lunar or Mars surfaces. Arquimea has thermal control hardware for high and low temperatures, and solutions to decouple sink from components, securing the functionality of the components inside the lunar vehicle. These solutions, with TRL9 in both heat pipes (HP) and Loop Heat Pipes (LHPs), required new proposals...
Development of generic MLI flap for spacecraft interface ring
The launch vehicle adapter (LVA) is used to connect spacecraft to the launch vehicle. The spacecraft interface ring, which connects the S/C to the LVA, remains exposed after separation, when the spacecraft is released to its target orbit. The unprotected and exposed interface ring on the spacecraft represents thus a significant...
Long lasting mission on the Moon both robotic and human are limited mainly by electricity and heat, with the first one used also extensively to produce heat. An efficient heat management, even better, completely passive is the key to enable these missions. Azimut Space explored and verified two technologies in this field.
The first one, developed with and in the frame of a mission for DLR, is...
CoCa is visible light range imager onboard the Comet Interceptor spacecraft. Its objective is to provide color imaging of a comet, at a resolution sufficient to determine its structure and homogeneity. The launch is planned in 2029.
A brief introduction to the Comet Interceptor mission is presented, followed by a description of the CoCa thermal design.
The requirements to the CoCa thermal...
SMILE is a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The mission is aimed to observe the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth magnetosphere by simultaneous X-ray imaging of the magnetosheath combined with UV imaging of the northern aurora. ESA will be in charge of the Payload Module, while the Service and the Propulsion Module is...
The Sample Fetch Rover (SFR) was a key element of the Mars Sample Return program, having the objective to locate, retrieve and return samples cached by the Mars 2020 (Perseverance) Rover. Designed for autonomous operations and fast mobility on Mars terrains, the Sample Fetch Rover mission profile included traverse to the “depot” where Perseverance will have left the tubes containing soil and...
The Columbus Ka band terminal (ColKa) is a communication system, currently installed outside the ISS, that connects the Columbus laboratory and the European Data Relay Satellite system. It enhanced the existing Columbus on-orbit and ground communication systems and created an additional bi-directional Ka band data transmission for the ISS.
The communications system electronics, provided by...
The EarthCARE satellite TB/TV test was performed in the Large Space Simulator facility (LSS) at ESTEC, in the period of January 26th, to February 9th, 2023.
The test objectives, the test phases and the requirements for the test environment led to a test setup with an active cooling system for the ATLID PLH’s and a cavity for the CPR main reflector. The test set-up including cooling loop and...
JUICE - JUpiter ICy moons Explorer - is the first large-class mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme. With its launch in April 2023 and the arrival at Jupiter in 2031, it will spend at least three years making detailed observations of the giant gaseous planet Jupiter and three of its largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. The JUICE spacecraft carries the most powerful remote...
Today, thermoelastic treatment relies on providing maps of average temperatures by zone. This is a conservative approach because these temperatures gradients are maximized. The main objective is to develop an automated link between mechanical engineering models and thermal analysis ones, with different methods (finite elements vs nodal method) and significative geometrical representativeness...
In this contribution, the concept of a thermal simulation environment for moving objects on the lunar surface is presented. The goal of this thermal simulation environment is to enable the reliable calculation of the temperature behaviour of a given object on the lunar surface by providing the respective transient heat fluxes for a mission on a given travel path.
At first, the modelling...
Almost every Scientific and Earth Observation mission is faced with the need for thermo-elastic verification.
The European Space community has been, despite all previous activities to date, lacking commonly accepted guidelines for performing the end-to-end thermo-elastic verification.
To solve this issue, ESA emitted an invitation to tender, in 2020, to the European Community to work for...
In the quest for planetary exploration, rovers have played a pivotal role in gathering crucial data and expanding our understanding of the planetary surfaces. Currently, due to the active participation of the ESA in NASA’s Artemis program, the European space industry is actively developing technologies for lunar surface exploration such as robotic rovers.
In this context, TU Delft’s Zebro...
With the growing interest in lunar missions during the last few years, the demand for technologies which allow hardware to survive the extreme conditions of the lunar night has increased. One promising approach is to enable high performance bi-directional thermal control in space applications.
Lunar Outpost EU has developed and tested an active thermal switch for this purpose. The device...
An overview of the nuclear propulsion for space applications will be presented with a particular focus on thermal challenges. Both Nuclear thermal Propulsion and Nuclear Electric Propulsion will be detailed also providing few concepts for future missions and technical thermal challenges to be overcome to reach mission readiness.
It is common for CubeSat missions to use simplified analysis models, leveraging software suites which are tuned for thermal analysis with coarse mechanical and power dissipation models of spacecraft components. The inherent non-linearity of thermal simulations and the complexity of typical boundary conditions for realistic satellite components often result in this trade-off and reduction in...
The in-flight evolution of thermo-optical properties of thermal coatings is of great concern when defining the thermal control system (TCS) of spacecraft. Experience (in-flight measurements and aging tests in laboratory) demonstrates that the parameter really affected by the in-orbit aging is the solar absorptivity, which often increases when coatings are under space environment conditions. To...
The ESA EnVision will determine the nature and current state of Venus' geological evolution and its relationship with the atmosphere, to understand how and why Venus and Earth evolved so differently.Perched at the inner edge of the habitable zone, Venus may once have been habitable, with liquid water oceans, before developing the enormous greenhouse warming which renders it uninhabitable...
Humanity is tackling the challenge of creating a permanent human presence on the Moon, and Canada is contributing by funding novel ideas for Moon infrastructure. With support from the Canadian Space Agency under the Lunar Surface Exploration Initiative, Canadian companies are actively developing solutions to explore and stay for extended periods on our planet’s satellite.
Under this...
Arquimea Space recently developed a Heat Pipes and Radiators Assembly (HPRA) for the 3MI Instrument (Leonardo S.p.A., Campi Bisenzio site) onboard MetOp SG satellite (Airbus DS, ESA).
Arquimea Space was in charge of the design, manufacturing, verification and testing of this HPRA, following the corresponding specifications from The Leonardo Company. Six models have been produced and delivered...
OBJECTIVE: The role of the Thermal mathematical model is to help in the design of the spacecraft Thermal Control System. Temperature uncertainty must be decreased as much as possible and kept under control, to achieve this whole process must be well thought-out especially validating thermal model via TVAC test. The purpose of this study was to determine steps and measures that allow us to...
Traditional spacecraft thermal modelling processes can be costly and time-consuming due to manual effort required by engineers to build and update thermal models. Recent advancements in AI and machine learning have enabled automation of many thermal engineering tasks including geometry construction, model reduction, mesh creation, etc. In this technical presentation, we will showcase the...
The Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR) is part of ESA’s Sentinel Expansion missions and is a complex system involving a satellite platform, a rotating microwave radiometer and a deployable mesh reflector. The purpose of the mission is to monitor and provide information on Earth’s water surfaces, by gathering radiometric data on sea surface temperature, sea-ice concentration and...
Space simulation in Thermal Vacuum Chambers is one of the major tests performed for Spacecraft qualification.
During these tests, huge amount (several thousands) of parameters need to be acquired for near real time real supervision or post-test analysis.
These parameters can come from :
- The test...
For all its satellites, Airbus Defence and Space relies on top-level technology to implement the Thermal Control System. This Thermal Control System shall ensure that payload and/or equipment heat dissipation is transported and spread onto the S/C cold sinks (radiators) efficiently enough to maintain temperatures in the allowable ranges.
For this duty, some of the most advanced thermo-fluidic...
The Martian Moon eXploration (MMX) mission, led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is scheduled for launch in 2024 with the objective of sample-return from the Martian Moon Phobos and additional scientific observations of Deimos. As part of this mission, the MMX rover 'IDEFIX', developed collaboratively by the French Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German...
Latest generation of active antennas designs are demanding low thermal gradients and low volume (specially for LEO designs). Additive manufacturing introduces high flexibility to fulfil these main requirements, the 2-phase thermal component can be directly manufactured in the system to refrigerate, improving the thermal behaviour and increasing the level of integration in the system.
A...
This presentation describes current status and future prospect of R&D activities on two-phase heat transport technology of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). In addition to passive thermal control devices such as a loop heat pipe (LHP) and an oscillating heat pipe (OHP), R&D activities of active thermal control devices such as two-phase mechanical pumped loop are conducted. Active...
This study presents a comprehensive investigation of the thermal balance characteristics and model correlation of a radar panel sample from ROSE-L (Copernicus SAR Instrument), incorporating the usage of high dissipative electronic units and featuring two distinct optical coating variants for the radiative antenna front.
The study aims to assess the thermal performance of the radar panel...
Spacecraft components that are exposed to deep space often require testing at the cryogenic temperature levels they will sustain during the mission. To that end, a test facility not only requires a chamber capable of reaching high vacuum levels, but also the means of reaching temperatures below that of liquid nitrogen.
Moreover, this paper describes the design and implementation of mechanical...
Arquimea Space recently developed a thermal control system (TCS) that removes and transport high power levels (up to 6 kW) from the active antennae DRA (Airbus D&S-Spain) on board GEO Telecom Satellite satellites (Airbus D&S-France, Hisdesat, ESA). This TCS was defined after a coengineering phase with Aribus D&S Spain. Then, Arquimea Space carried out the detailed design, manufacturing and...
Thermal analysis for space systems encounters a significant bottleneck in computing radiative heating contributions to the heat transfer problem, particularly when transparent and specular materials come into play. In this study, we introduce an innovative implementation that harnesses the remarkable parallel processing capabilities of ray tracing on Graphical Display Units (GPUs)....
High-performance computers designed for space applications face significant challenges related to excessive heat generation and high-power density within confined volumes. These issues arise due to the intense computational demands required for Earth observation space missions, future space data centers and systems in spacecrafts for processing data of all kinds. Managing heat dissipation and...
This work presents a new implementation of the radiative exchange factors calculations for 3D geometry using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) with hardware-accelerated ray tracing capabilities.
Radiative exchange factors (REFs) represent the overall exchange of thermal radiation energy between two surfaces. Although there are analytical solutions for particular geometric configurations, in...
The thermal control of satellites requires technologies that can effectively heat sensitive areas, while alleviating the constraints associated with this need.
Nowadays each piece of equipment or subsystem may require one or even several heating lines, which imposes constraints such as:
- Need to multiply the lines in order to guarantee a certain temperature homogeneity
- Each line...
The camera head of the Wide Field Imager (WFI), which is to fly on the x-ray telescope ATHENA, is a compact system requiring the integration of three separate temperature regions. One will be the environment temperature of the instruments support structure. The other two temperature environments are governed by the requirements of the detector front end electronics and the detector itself. To...
The satellite telecommunications industry is currently undergoing significant evolutions. Future communication satellites need to accommodate a rapidly growing demand in data transfer, combined with more flexibility. For example, there is a strong need for Very High Throughput Satellites capable of delivering up to Terabyte per second over wide coverage areas. This is only possible when an...
EcosimPro is a versatile mathematical tool that excels in modeling and simulating both continuous and discrete systems, making it particularly adept at non-causal simulation. It is capable of effectively handling Differential-Algebraic Equations (DAE) and Discrete Events, offering applicability across various problem domains. Originally funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) to simulate...
In order to homogenize the temperature distribution over an electronic box, the use of heat pipes is investigated. The operating temperature range is between + 20 °C and + 85 °C. The expected main working range is between + 20 °C and + 55 °C. The total heat dissipation to be transported is 45 W. It is distributed over three locations: Evaporator 1 (top left position): 7 W; Evaporator 2 (top...
SYSTEMA – THERMICA
Léa Galeron, Antoine Caugant, Mathieu Lepilliez
(Airbus Defence and Space SAS, Toulouse, France)
The presentation will begin with an overview of the two releases of Systema issued the past year, then a segment will be dedicated to the operational validation of the last Long Term Support (LTS) version.
Systema 4.9.2P1 was released last April 2023 to address some...
Chemical compatibility between the main components of two-phase heat transfer devices is of critical importance for correct operation and stability throughout the device’s operational lifetime. The use of incompatible fluid-metal combinations can lead to corrosion and/or the generation of non-condensable gas (NCG), both of which result in reduction in heat transfer performance or complete...
Radian is a thermal analysis software conceived to provide agility to engineers, both at modelling and computing processes. Our software is accessible through a regular web browser and counts on a scalable network of computing resources in the cloud. Thermal analyses are supported by the Databank, a catalogue of satellite components and other reusable entities. The underlying simulation engine...
ESATAN-TMS provides an advanced thermal modelling environment for the thermal analysis of spacecraft and launch vehicles. The suite is continually being enhanced to meet current and future requirements of space projects, and to support the specific needs of thermal engineers. This presentation will focus on the latest development to be included in the coming ESATAN-TMS 2024.
The increasing demand in image quality provided by forthcoming observation missions needs both to use very low-CTE materials for focal planes, such as Silicon Carbide (SiC), and to accommodate electronics very close to the detector. Such a highly integrated focal plane thus implies an efficient Thermal Control to drain the heat dissipation and ensure a high stability of the detector...
The On-Ground Calibration Target (OGCT) for the Ice Cloud Imager (ICI), to be flown on the Metop-SG Satellite B, has been developed, built and sub-system tested in a joint effort by IABG mbH (thermal design, modelling & testing, thermal control sub-system manufacturing), Thomas Keating Ltd. (radio frequency & mechanical design, mechanical manufacturing), and the Institute of Applied Physics of...
ESA’s HERA mission launching in October 2024 is the follow-up to NASA’s DART mission, investigating planetary defence measures by impacting the Dimorphos asteroid, part of the Didymos binary asteroid system. HERA’s mission is to measure the momentum transfer from DART as well as catalogue in greater detail the asteroids’ properties. HERA will carry two CubeSats: Milani and Juventas. Juventas...
The 3Cat-4 is the fourth member of the CubeSat series of UPC’s NanoSat Lab, selected in ESA Academy’s Flight Your Satellite program in 2017. This mission mission aims at demonstrating the capabilities of nanosatellites, and in particular those based in the 1-Unit CubeSat standard, for challenging Earth Observation (EO) using Global Navigation Satellite System - Reflectometry (GNSS-R) and L -...
The Atmospheric Remote-sensing and Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL) is a space observatory and the fourth medium-class (4M) mission of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Cosmic Vision programme. One of the instruments on board ARIEL is Fine Guidance System (FGS). This optic sensor provides high-precision pointing information for the telescope which is an input to its attitude control...
It is generally known that thermal contact resistance between two bodies is a function of pressure, hardness, and thermal conductivity [1]. In most engineering cases there is a constant trade-off between the demands of the thermal design and other requirements. It is especially true for typical cubesat applications [2]. This means it may not always be feasible to apply high pressure or utilize...
The Wide-Field-Imager (WFI) instrument is one of two instruments planned to fly on the ATHENA observatory. At its current capabilities, WFI can image incoming X-ray photons in the energy band from 0.2 eV up to 15 keV and a time resolution of less than 5ms with its Large Detector (LD) Array . It also has the provision for high-count rate measurements in the same energy band using a Fast...
