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Heat pipes efficiency for space thermal engineering is widely recognized and illustrated. Among majority of heat transfer tasks the heat pipe employment for high precision optical devices' thermal control is interesting and challenging. The main heat pipe functions are associated with a) heat removal tasks in the wide temperature range (90 ÷ 300 K), b) heat transfer and redistribution inside/outside of system, c) providing of isothermality of mounting plate (seats) of devices; d) regulating of temperature in selected device or group of devices. The brief description of technical realization example of heat pipe application in peculiarities of small satellite design is subject of this report.

The results of the long-term (15 days) continuous cryovacuum tests of the “SODART” telescope silicon detector cooler scale-down model are considered. The detector quasistationary thermal regime has been attained when simulated the heat fluxes flowing from Earth to cooler radiators. The cooler load characteristic is obtained at three values of the detector heat release. The data obtained were stated in terms of the real cooler system shows that with the detector useful load of 300 mW its temperature will not exceed 140 K in all orbit points including the Earth radiation belts. The data obtained have been used to calculate the full-scale model structure components temperature. The observation time for the above heat releases at different detector operation temperatures is also estimated.