Sun Sensor Alignment and Bracket Design of a Communication Satellite

Various Attitude Determination and Control System (ADCS)sensors are required to be located on a geostationary satellite. Each sensor has its own certain interface requirements regarding allocation and thermal control. Sun sensors are mainly used in ADCS in order to detect the presence of the sun or the orientation of the sun with respect to satellite platform. The main duty of satellite thermal control subsystem is to remove the excess heat from equipment and keeping it in required temperature levels. This paper compares various thermal control design solutions of sun sensors, which have distinct thermal hardware, including Optical Solar Reflector (OSR), heat pipe, Multilayer Insulation (MLI). Two discrete equipment allocation and three different bracket designs are studied under three main design scenarios. Pre-processing and post-processing steps of the analysis are performed on MSC THERMICA whereas MSC SINDA is used as the numerical solver.