The question of where we come from and whether we are alone in the world has always fascinated people. One of the common techniques to look for life on planets too far away to study is to explore by spacecraft the light given off by faraway planets that can reveal clues about a planet's properties.
The spacecraft observe the infrared light from the distant planet as most molecules that would be likely indicators of life emit or absorb radiation in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Once the distant planet passes in front of the sun, regarding the position of the satellite telescope, the sun illuminates the planet, so a fraction of the sun light is reflected by the atmosphere of the planet, a fraction of the light is absorbed by the atmosphere of the planet and a fraction of the light is transmitted by the atmosphere of the planet.
Similar missions to study the universe such as Planck, Spitzer Telescope and Herschel have already been carried out in the past. However, to date, there is no effective mechanism to capitalise on the spacecraft thermal and mechanical architecture and design established during past missions available for the whole space thermal engineers' community.
The key design driver of the payload are an extremely high stability (less than 1K) and cold temperature. The function of the cold payload is to shield the instrument from the warm Service Module (SM) of the spacecraft and to provide it with the required cooling and thermal stability. The main Thermal Control Hardware including all passive or active components that are used to reach and maintain the operating temperatures of the payload units within their required ranges are: V-Grooves (including bipods and struts), Instrument Radiator, Telescope Baffle, Thermal straps, Heaters, etc. They all will be represented in the thermal simulation model.
V-Grooves remove the heat from the Service Module to the space by multi-reflections. The Instrument Radiator removes the heat from the Instrument Box where the payload units are located to the space by radiation. The Telescope Baffle removes the heat from the Telescope to the space by radiation. Thermal straps remove the heat from detectors to the Instrument Radiator. Heaters (PID Controllers) eliminate the tiny temperature oscillations on the detectors and mirror by injecting an extremely low variable amount of power depending on the measured temperature.
Learn The 7 steps to build the geometry from CAD models for thermal analysis
Benefits: Known approach.
Limitations: Building the detailed thermal model of the scientific satellite is very time-consuming
Standardising the thermal model of such scientific satellite will significantly reduce its development time.
We will build the detailed thermal model of such scientific satellite and fully parametrise all the geometrical and material properties such as construction points, thermal conductivities, etc. in a way that the same scientific satellite thermal model can be quickly reused and adapted to another mission with similar requirements.
We will also create a library of thermo-optical properties and materials used for this mission so they can be reused in other projects as well. We will validate our scientific satellite thermal model with the test and flight data and make it accessible to the entire space thermal engineers’ community via our Digital Engineer® Try it now