Thermal Shadowing

Using the Monte Carlo ray tracer of RadCAD (a package in the Thermal Desktop suite), Olivier Godard and Tejas Shah came up with this simulation. What you see is the view of the belly of the Space Shuttle as it rotates around the Earth from the international space station. The Space Shuttle orbiter has its with the payload bay looking Nadir. Above it and traveling at the same speed is the International Space Station (ISS) which shadows the Space Shuttle whenever both of them are lit by the sun. The 1354 number in the legend is the Sun's heat flux -in Watt per meter square (W/m2)- received by the Shuttle from the Sun. The blue color shows most of the ISS blocking the Sun's heat flux. In other words what you see is the shadow of the ISS on the Shuttle. We could have done it with a raytracer used for animated movie rendering but what the nice feature here is that you can obtain a similar result that is directly usable for other thermal related computations.