TABLE OF CONTENTS As must have been noticed by now, satellites must employ certain thermal control hardware to produce the required temperatures and provide margins to compensate for uncertainties and tolerances.
Flight-proven thermal hardware, generally considered standard equipment, consists of multilayered insulation (MLI); coatings; heat pipes and related systems; louvers; and heaters with associated thermostats or solid-state controllers. Also included are incidentals such as isolators, conductive straps, and interface fillers. There have been few uses of thermoelectric and stored-coolant cryogenic systems (Chapter 4, Sec. VI) and, for sometime now, there has been excitement over the capillary pumped loop (CPL), a two-phase device that has been proposed for use on the space station.
