Flight Performance of HALCA Satellite Thermal Control

The ISAS's space VLBI satellite HALCA was successfully launched in February 1997. The spacecraft HALCA consists of a box shaped main structure and a large deployable mesh antenna with 8 m effective diameter. The integrated spacecraft with the mesh structure antenna is so large and complex that the thermal design and tests had been performed separately for the main structure and the large antenna. No thermal vacuum test had been conducted in the fully integrated spacecraft configuration. The complex heat exchange between the antenna and the main structure had been taken into account in the numerical thermal analysis. Good correlation between in-orbit temperature and flight prediction has proved validity of the design and the verification method where no integrated spacecraft thermal vacuum test was performed.