Determination of Worst Thermal Cases and Use of Equivalent Boundary Conditions for External Payloads of the International Space Station

The thermal analysis of experiments mounted on the ISS requires to simulate accurately the radiative heat transfer among ISS elements and the orbital fluxes from the sun and the earth. The complexity of the ISS, its orbital parameters and attitudes make this simulation long and costly. Alternatives have been proposed, as the use of equivalent radiative conditions. This paper presents an analysis of the alternative method and a verification of its accuracy, in the case of a typical ISS pay load.