7.3 General Design Process

1. Gather requirements
2. Adjust thermal coatings to see if requirements can be met with purely passive thermal control
3. Develop a multi-node thermal model
4. Determine conduction and radiation couplings that lead to acceptable temperatures. If needed, relocate components and/or use active thermal control.
5. Predict performance for different scenarios of couplings, environments, surface properties, power dissipations.
6. Compute max and min orbit avg temperature using model estimates and average power dissipation
7. Thermal balance test