Spacecraft Thermal Control (Woodhead Publishing in Mechanical Engineering)

The authors, with their extensive experience in aerospace engineering, provide detailed chapters on how to design a Space Thermal Control System comprehensively. They begin with an overview of the basic and specific concepts of a space mission, its development phases, the environment it must withstand, the orbits and trajectories needed to accomplish the mission and the subsystems that help to achieve this, before moving on to explain the fundamentals of heat transfer.  The concluding two sections focus on the numerous technologies that can be employed in the thermal control subsystem and the formal aspects of spacecraft development, specifically the design, analysis and testing.

Space systems: The space mission; Space environment; Orbits; Spacecraft subsystems; Space payloads; Fundamentals of heat transfer for spacecraft thermal design: Conductive heat transfer; Thermal radiation heat transfer; in orbit thermal loads; Example: Isothermal satellite surface temperature; Thermal control technologies: Introduction; Surface thermal finishes; Insulation systems; Radiators; Louvers; Mechanical interfaces; Heat pipes; Phase-change materials; Electrical heating; Fluid loops; Thermo-electric cooling; Cryogenic cooling; Thermal protection systems; Thermal control design, Analysis and testing: Thermal control design; Thermal control analysis; Thermal control testing; Examples; Appendix A: Material properties; Appendix B: Geometrical factors.