Incorporation of an external heat flux computation module to an in-house code for the thermal analysis of satellites

In this paper, a newly developed module for the calculation of external heat fluxes in space and its incorporation to an existing solver is described. The module calculates the solar, albedo (earth reflected) and earth fluxes acting on a spacecraft as a function of time based on the specified orbit parameters. These fluxes are then used as input to the in-house solver for the transient thermal analysis of the spacecraft. The preliminary results on a simple test case are compared with the predictions of commercial software. The comparisons reveal that the developed module calculates external fluxes accurately.