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The Mars Science Laboratory will be the next Martian mobility system that is scheduled to launch in the fall of 2011. The ChemCam Instrument is a part of the MSL science payload suite. It is innovative for planetary exploration in using a technique referred to as laser breakdown spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of samples from distances of up to about 9 meters away. ChemCam is led by a team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in Toulouse, France. The portion of ChemCam that is located inside the Rover, the ChemCam Body Unit contains the imaging charged-coupled device (CCD) detectors. Late in the design cycle, the ChemCam team explored alternate thermal design architectures to provide CCD operational overlap with the Rover's remote sensing instruments. This operational synergy is necessary to enable planning for subsequent laser firings and geological context.

The Cassini spacecraft, NASA's mission to investigate the Saturn system, has undergone a system-level thermal balance test program to permit verification of the engineering subsystem thermal designs in the simulated worst-case environments. Additionally, other objectives such as functional checkouts, collection of thermal data for analytical model adjustment, vacuum drying of propellant tanks, and flight temperature transducer verification were also completed. In the interest of cost and schedule, transient off-Sunpoint conditions were not tested. The testing demonstrated that the required system resources such as heater power and radiator area were adequate for all engineering subsystems. The only changes required from the results were related to the operation of some of the subsystems. In the instance of the thruster cluster assemblies, allowable flight temperature limits were exceeded for the assumed operational environment.

The Cassini spacecraft, NASA's mission to investigate the Saturn system, has undergone a system-level thermal balance test program to permit verification of the science instrument thermal designs in the simulated worst-case environments. Additionally, other objectives such as functional checkout, collection of thermal data for analytical model adjustment, and flight temperature transducer verification were also attained. In the interest of cost and schedule, transient off-sunpoint conditions were not tested. The test demonstrated that the required system resources such as heater power and radiator area were adequate. In the instance of the Cosmic Dust Analyzer, allowable flight temperature limits were violated, but this problem is being addressed without a significant impact to system resources or thermal design robustness. Finally, the thermal acceptability of a black Kapton “sock” was demonstrated for the magnetometer boom.

The Cassini spacecraft, NASA's mission to investigate the Saturn system, has undergone an extensive thermal development test program to characterize subsystem thermal control designs. In the interest of cost and schedule, not every subsystem was subjected to thermal development testing. The majority of the testing demonstrated that the required system resources such as heater power were adequate. In the instances of the stowed magnetometer boom canister, the sun sensor head assembly, the Huygens Probe receiver front-end, the thruster cluster assembly, and radar science instrument, unexpected thermal design inadequacies were uncovered, but these problems were solved without a significant impact to system resources or thermal design robustness. Additionally, a self-regulating non-electrical heater, a radiant energy transport method, and a reverse louver were successfully demonstrated.