Creation, Calculation and Testing of Thermal Control System for Cassini Cosmic Dust Analyzer

The Thermal Control System (TCS) ensuring the Allowable Flight Temperature (AFT) at extremly different thermal loads, caused from mission conditions for the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) on board of the NASA/ESA-CASSINI-Satellite, is considered.

The CDA is an extremly lightweight and large instrument with a large instrument boreside in space- direction. Important for the thermal situation of CDA are emittance and solar absorptance of the large space-exposed inner surfaces. For these surfaces we used gold sputtered films. Gold has a good long term stability, heat losses will be limited and the quite often external heat load will be harmless. For heat power supplementation and temperature stabilization CDA receives additional heat from S/C by radiation and conduction.