THERMAL DESIGN METHODOLOGY FOR NANO-SATELLITES UNDER UNCERTAIN THERMAL CONDITIONS

摘要

Nano-satellites such as CubeSats have been focused recently for its low-costness and short development time. By choosing appropriate missions, they are expected to open a new way of space development.rnThermal design is one hurdle for nano-satellites because (1) their orbit usually is not decided at conceptual design phase, (2) their attitude is in most case non-controlled and (3) there are very few degrees of freedom for thermal control due to its resource limitation.rnA novel thermal design methodology has been studied to deal with these obstacles. Especially the way to compensate for the uncertainty of the thermal environment has been focused.rnIn this paper, the special features of nano-satellite thermal design problem and countermeasure are discussed first, followed by the proposal of a new design methodology, and finally applications to nano-satellite design including CubeSat will be described.