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Increasingly complex missions with reduced budgets has placed a premium on “better, cheaper, faster” system approaches for producing spacecraft. The natural consequence of this pressure to improve quality while reducing process time and expense is that activities once considered essential to design and development are now viewed as luxuries. To produce timely inputs during the condensed design phase, the spacecraft subsystem architect must continually improve the efficiency of analysis activities. This type of improvement is particularly necessary in the area of thermal analysis, which is often viewed as a peripheral activity. However, through the use of enhanced software analysis tools, the thermal engineer can ensure a comprehensive spacecraft thermal analysis that yields timely system design inputs in a cost-effective manner.

The Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) spacecraft is the first earth orbiting spacecraft in NASA's New Millennium Program. The New Millennium Program is part of the agency's Mission to Planet Earth enterprise, a series of space missions designed to enhance our knowledge of the Earth and its environmental systems. The EO-1's mission is to employ advanced remote-sensing technologies, including hyperspectral and multispectral imaging techniques, to develop highly accurate terrestrial images. In order to accomplish this mission, the spacecraft contains three primary instruments: Advanced Land Imager (ALI), Atmospheric Corrector, and Hyperion. The bus supporting these sensors is part of a 3-axis stabilized, nadir pointing spacecraft that employs an articulating solar array to provide a constant voltage, regulated power bus. EO-1 also contains several new technologies such as a carbon-carbon radiator and a pulsed plasma thruster that will be verified as part of the secondary mission objectives.