Performance and Thermal Design Validation for FM STEP Cube Lab.

Abstract

The STEP Cube Lab. classified as a pico-class satellite has been successfully developed as a flight model(FM) to be launched in 2015. Its mission objective is to perform the on-orbit verification of fundamental space core-technologies. In this study, a thermal design concept based on the passive method to achieve the mission objective is introduced. The effectiveness of the thermal design and performance of the satellite has been verified through the acceptance level thermal vacuum test. In addition, to improve the reliability of thermal mathematical model, correlation was performed using the results of thermal balance test. This paper describes a series of process for the thermal vacuum test on the STEP Cube Lab. FM.