A generalized approach to the thermal analysis of the Long Duration Exposure Facility's flight experiments

The generalized method used in the thermal analysis of the LDEF flight experiments is presented. The approach consists of developing a mathematical lumped parameter node representation of the experiment; defining the source and sink temperature boundary conditions; calculating the albedo, infrared, and solar orbital heating fluxes; and solving with a finite difference technique. The temperature predictions can be made either on a per orbit basis or for any length of mission time using a daily averaged calculated composite flux. The thermal analysis of the Ultra Heavy Cosmic Ray Experiment (UHCRE-A0178) is presented as an example of this approach.