• A thermal-constraint assessment method is proposed for satellite mission planning. • The method enables post-planning verification with minimal parameters. • The concept of thermal surplus is proposed. • Ensuring both the operational efficiency and system safety of satellite missions. As the demand for satellite imagery continues to grow, efficient mission planning has become increasingly critical. These satellites perform tasks such as imaging, data compression and transmission, all of which are subject to a variety of limitations, including energy constraints, terrestrial constraints and thermal constraints. To improve mission success rates, this paper proposes a thermal constraint assessment method (TCAM) and integrates thermal constraints into the post-planning verification process. First of all, this study simplified the thermal balance theory for the specific device by applying mathematical techniques. The applicable scope of this method is defined as non-sunlit equipment on sun-synchronous orbit satellites. So as to establish TCAM, the concept of thermal surplus ( P s ) was proposed. We further developed TCAM to the Jilin-1 satellites on-orbit mission planning. Over 15 orbital cycles, the highest temperature of the data process unit exhibited a correlation with P s , while consistently remaining within the permissible thermal limit. The results demonstrated the effectiveness and feasibility of the TCAM.
Bai et al. (Sun,) studied this question.