The Node 2 has been launched by NSTS-120 flight on October 23rd 2007.
The Thermal Control has been identified as one of the critical systems for which the off site support (in Torino) has been mandatory required by NASA/ESA to the thermal specialists that directly followed the design and manufacturing of the thermal hardware.
A team of specialists has been trained to adequately support the mission from Torino TAS-I plant for both active and passive thermal aspects. The support consisted into troubleshooting of unexpected problems occurred during the mission for which a fast thermal assessment was necessary, provision of thermal predictions to support changes in the activation procedures, processing of telemetry data for mathematical models correlation.
This paper describes the thermal issues encountered during the provided mission support and how they have been solved.
In addition it is described how the mathematical models, both passive and active, have been correlated exploiting the telemetry data.