Advanced Spacecraft Thermal Management Technologies

Recent designs for small satellite deployable space radiators have typically employed constant conductance or looped heat pipes embedded in thin-skinned honeycomb sandwich panels in order to meet stringent mass and area constraints. Deployable radiator systems utilizing loop heat pipes have been used in a spiral coil configuration to permit the necessary relative motion during deployment while providing an effective thermal path between radiator panels. These measures have resulted in reduced area and lower mass systems, as compared with solid metal plate conduction-based designs, but tend to be relatively expensive and also leave room for further improvement. Next-generation satellites and payloads, like those targeted for the Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) program will require lightweight and efficient thermal management systems. We are proposing a simpler, less costly, elegant approach to radiator design that distributes the heat to be radiated uniformly over the entire surface. This results in a nearly isothermal radiating surface with corresponding fin efficiency near 100%. Therefore, current and future missions, including the current and planned TacSat experiments, can be enabled with a new thermal management system that increases mission life and hardware efficiency.