Thermal Test Chamber

April 23, 2025

Author: Biarki Weeks VE7WEK

We have acquired a thermal test chamber, courtesy of funding from ARDC as part of the Modular CubeSat Radio Project. This new capability greatly increases the quality and variety of environmental tests that we can perform in house, reducing the need for external test facilities during the development process, and facilitating the faster development of more reliable hardware. With an operational range from -68°C to 180°C it provides the ability to verify components and subsystem operation at the bounds of their specified range, as well as in dynamic scenarios, for example cycling approximating changes in temperature in sun-synchronous orbit, as a satellite like MARMOTSat goes between sunlight and eclipse.

Thermal chamber right after being unpacked

Thus far the new chamber has been used to verify the functionality of our solar panel deployment mechanism over temperature, as well as the resilience of the TT&C subsystem to thermal cycling, and sustained low and high temperature. We are looking forward to further utilizing the chamber to test the various other custom subsystems in development as they become ready for testing, and we are thankful to ARDC for providing the funding which enabled this important acquisition.