Demo: Satellite Thermal Analysis, real-time orbital thermal at 43ms

Niva’s Satellite Thermal Analysis is live on the Demos page. The demo, a web-based example of Manifold’s capabilities, runs a CubeSat through Manifold's physics engine in real time, with sliders for orbit altitude, beta angle, internal power dissipation, and orbit position. Every slider movement recomputes the full thermal energy balance in 43 milliseconds: temperature distribution across every surface, component-level thermal margins, and pass/fail status against operational limits.

What the demo does

• Selectable visualization fields: temperature and heat flux across solar panels, body panels, radiators, antenna, and payload bay.
• Component-level temperature predictions with hot and cold margins against operational limits: battery, payload, solar panels, flight computer, reaction wheels, and other subsystems.
• Four preset orbital scenarios: dawn-dusk sun-synchronous (always sunlit), ISS orbit (typical eclipse cycling), high beta angle (thermal stress), and deep eclipse (cold case).
• Find Passing Configuration button that searches the parameter space for thermal compliance.
• Play Orbit animation that walks the spacecraft around the orbit while the thermal field updates continuously.

Why it means for the satellite industry

Traditional satellite thermal analysis tools (Thermal Desktop, ESATAN) take 4 to 8 hours per configuration. A thermal engineer evaluating a new mission profile, a power dissipation change, or an orbit alteration faces a long wait per data point, which means the engineering process is sequential: pick a configuration, run it overnight, evaluate, repeat. Manifold computes the same multi-physics thermal balance in milliseconds, which collapses that sequential workflow into an interactive one. Dozens of orbital scenarios become explorable in the same time it used to take to run one.

For CubeSat developers in particular, where mission timelines are short and engineering teams are small, the ability to interactively explore thermal margins against orbit and power profiles changes the design conversation entirely.

Try it out

The demo runs in the browser at https://www.nivatech.io/demos/satellite-thermal.
Other demos are available at https://www.nivatech.io/demos.

One platform, multiple domains

Satellite Thermal Analysis is one slice of what Manifold does. The same architecture runs orbital state prediction at microsecond solver latency, polymer certification in 143 milliseconds, and contact-rich robotic manipulation at 60 Hz. Different domains, same platform: constitutive physics that runs continuously, deterministic solvers producing every state transition, with sensor data refining the world model.