Chapter 24 — Further Reading: Thermal Control

Thermal control is a mature, quantitative craft with excellent references. Start with the survey chapters in the standard mission-engineering texts, then go to the dedicated thermal handbooks for depth. Tiers follow the book's citation policy (Tier 1 = canonical works I am confident exist; Tier 2 = real sources whose exact edition/detail you should verify).

Textbooks and handbooks

• Wertz, Everett & Puschell, Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD (Microcosm/Springer). (Tier 1) The single best starting point. Its thermal chapter gives the environment loads, the equilibrium-balance method, and typical coating $\alpha/\varepsilon$ values, all in the mission-design context this book shares. Read this first.
• Gilmore (ed.), Spacecraft Thermal Control Handbook, Vol. I: Fundamentals and Design (The Aerospace Press / AIAA). (Tier 1) The field's reference work — MLI, radiators, heat pipes, louvers, coatings, and worst-case analysis in full engineering detail. When a real design question arises, this is where practitioners look.
• Incropera & DeWitt, Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer (Wiley). (Tier 1) Not spacecraft-specific, but the authoritative grounding in radiation exchange, Stefan–Boltzmann, view factors, and the lumped-capacitance transient method behind the eclipse-cooldown calculation.
• Karam, Satellite Thermal Control for Systems Engineers (AIAA Progress in Astronautics). (Tier 2) A compact, systems-level treatment aimed exactly at the reader sizing a subsystem for the first time.

Free and online

• NASA State-of-the-Art (SoA) Small Spacecraft Technology report — Thermal Control chapter. (Tier 2) Free NASA PDF, updated periodically; a current survey of smallsat radiators, coatings, heat pipes, and louvers with real product data — ideal companion to Case Study 24.2.
• ESA and NASA thermal engineering pages / lecture notes. (Tier 2) Several university spacecraft-design courses post thermal lecture sets that work the equilibrium-temperature and radiator-sizing problems with numbers; search for "spacecraft thermal control lecture."

Primary sources and mission documentation

• NASA JWST Observatory / sunshield technical descriptions and press materials. (Tier 2) The public documentation of the sunshield layer temperatures ($\sim 383\ \text{K}$ to $\sim 36\ \text{K}$) and the $\sim 40\ \text{K}$ passive floor underpins Case Study 24.1; treat specific numbers as widely reported.
• NASA technical reports (NTRS) on MLI performance and on-orbit coating degradation. (Tier 1 archive) Searchable at ntrs.nasa.gov; the source for why flown MLI achieves $\varepsilon^{*} \approx 0.01$–$0.05$ and why $\alpha$ rises with UV and atomic-oxygen exposure.

Video and visual

• Scott Manley, thermal- and JWST-related explainers (YouTube). (Tier 2) Clear, physically honest walk-throughs of why spacecraft look the way they do — the gold foil, the white radiators, the JWST sunshield — that reinforce the "think in $\alpha/\varepsilon$" habit of this chapter.

Tools

• Thermal Desktop / SINDA, ESATAN-TMS. (Tier 2) The industry-standard thermal analysis packages that do numerically what our hand calculations sketch — nodal networks, radiation view factors, transient eclipse simulations. Worth knowing they exist even if you never run them.

Suggested order

1. Read the New SMAD thermal chapter for the whole picture in mission-design language.
2. Work the NASA smallsat SoA thermal chapter alongside Case Study 24.2 to see real hardware.
3. Dip into Gilmore's Handbook for whichever device (MLI, radiator, heat pipe, louver) your mission needs most.
4. Keep Incropera & DeWitt nearby for the underlying radiation physics whenever a derivation feels like a black box.