Sorption coolers using a continuous cycle to produce 20 K for the Planck flight mission Original Research Article

Two sorption coolers using hydrogen as the working fluid are currently being fabricated and assembled for flight delivery by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Being vibration free, scalable and with the capability for the cold end to be remotely located from the warm spacecraft are the major advantages of this class of cryo-coolers. These systems have been designed to provide a total cooling capacity (per cooler) of 1 W at a cold end temperature less than 19 K. They will be used for the Planck Surveyor mission (2007 launch). In this paper we present the level of maturity of the hydrogen sorption cooler technology at JPL by describing the design and how it has been validated at the subsystem and system levels.