The Thermal Control Design and Development of Turksat Communication Spacecraft

The TURKSAT Ku-Band Telecommunication program constitutes for Aerospatiale the successful result of technical, financial and time schedule challenges. After an overview of the Turksat mission, the system constraints assigned to the thermal control will be explained including the thermal control description of the satellite. The main interest for the thermal control of Turksat consists on one hand in the Protoflight development program, on the other hand in the starting point for the large scale application of Aerospatiale heat pipes on commercial satellite. The last part of the paper will deal with the good correlation between what was expected and what has been observed in flight, confirming the right selection for the development philosophy.