Launched on SpaceX Dragon vehicle on June 29, 2018, JPL's ECOSystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) instrument has successfully completed over five years in space and captured a number of important lessons learned. ECOSTRESS is a cryogenic instrument developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA. The mission lifetime for the instrument was 1-year, but because of its success and important science of high value, it has been granted several extensions to continue with on-orbit operations. ECOSTRESS is manifested to remain on-board the International Space Station (ISS) through Fiscal Year 2028. ECOSTRESS is a multispectral thermal infrared scanner with five spectral bands at 8-12.5 ?m for science and a band at 1.6 ?m for hot targets and cloud detection. ECOSTRESS provides data with 38m in-track by 69m cross-track spatial resolution and radiometric accuracy of 1 K and nominal precision of ? 0.3 K. A double-sided scan mirror, rotating at 25.4 rpm, allows the telescope to view a 53°wide nadir cross-track swath width of 402km and two internal blackbody calibration targets every 1.29 seconds. The thermal control subsystem maintains the instrument components within the allowable flight temperature limits. Its 13.2 ?m-cutoff Mercury Cadmium Telluride focal plane detector is cooled to 65 K by a pair of pulse tube cryocooolers and a third identical cryocooler cools an intermediate cold shield to 135 K. Waste heat generated by the cryocoolers and electronics is removed via heat exchangers cooled by a circulating pumped fluid loop provided by JAXA's JEM-EF module. Soon after the cold shield and focal plane cooled to their operating temperatures, ice contamination on focal plane and cold shield was detected. This paper provides a general overview of the cryogenic system and presents its on-orbit performance including impacts from ice contamination buildup and coolant fluid loop temperature changes.
Rodríguez et al. (Sun,) studied this question.