Japanese-US thermal science accelerometer project (JUSTSAP)

The JUSTSAP experiment is designed to measure the convective heat transport from the residual accelerations that occur on an orbiting spacecraft. The results will be correlated with data from an adjacent set of accelerometers in order to test analytical models (Naumann, 1996, Naumann, 1997) that predict the heat and mass transport that result from the integrated effects of the quasi-steady as well as the time dependent acceleration environment. Scaling laws derived from these analytical models can provide the basis for a more general theory, which will then assist experimenters in assessing how the expected acceleration environment might affect their experiments. Such analytic models must obviously make many simplifying assumptions in order to remain tractable while still retaining the necessary detail to give useful predictions. Therefore, it is essential to test the model's predictive capabilities experimentally. The JUSTSAP experiment will fly on STS-95 in the last quarter of CY1998.