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The use of the truss of the International Space Station (ISS) for the accommodation of several experiments, in the frame of the “Early opportunity for ISS utilization”, will have a lot of advantages such as the possibility of human or robotics intervention, the recovery of the experiment at the end of its life, visual inspection of the items and cost reduction with respect to an installation on a dedicated satellite. However, from the user point of view, the ISS generates a great number of disturbances and severe environmental conditions for the experiments providing constraints and affecting the performances in different areas (thermal, mechanical, and avionics). The present paper will discuss the thermal aspects (disturbances, constraints and performances) concerning three different projects, developed by Alenia Spazio Turin plant, that will be mounted on the truss of the ISS: Hexapod, Coarse Pointing Device (CPD) and Sky Polarization Observatory (SPOrt).

The thermal analysis of experiments mounted on the ISS requires to simulate accurately the radiative heat transfer among ISS elements and the orbital fluxes from the sun and the earth. The complexity of the ISS, its orbital parameters and attitudes make this simulation long and costly. Alternatives have been proposed, as the use of equivalent radiative conditions. This paper presents an analysis of the alternative method and a verification of its accuracy, in the case of a typical ISS pay load.