by lavalamp » Tue Jul 26, 2011 3:44 am
Well in that case, I did calculate the inward and outward heat separately.
More specifically I calculated the amount of energy absorbed due to the sun and the earth separately, taking account of the fact that the intensity of radiation from the earth varies, and for nearly half the orbit the earth blocks out the sun completely.
I then calculated how much energy is radiated by the satellite at it's specific temperature. With these two values, energy in and out, it's just a subtraction to find the total energy change, and then I recalculated the temperature of the satellite based on that. I did this for every time slice of the simulation, and the time slice was 1 ms (so a full simulation of 9 orbits took nearly 50 million steps).
I also used several values for the emissivity of the surface of the satellite which affects the amount of energy absorbed AND emitted.