Cool. Another of my jobs at GE AstroSpace involved writing software to help with the analysis of thermal system modeling. At its heart, thermal modeling is basically the same as one of the approaches for lighting models for 3D graphics: every surface within the spacecraft is radiating and absorbing heat from every other surface that it faces. This is similar to the way every surface in a 3D model visualization is emitting, reflecting, and absorbing various frequencies of light from every other surface it faces in the model.
The math is the same, but in the thermal model you're calculating an equilibrium state to figure out the final temperature of each surface, or cyclic variation in the case of a rotating spacecraft with the sun and other emitting bodies around it. That tells you if temperatures are within the tolerance range of the components over the mission lifetime. If not, you have to add thermal protection and rerun the simulation.
This probably all goes a lot faster today than it did on the 1990's era VAX minicomputer I was using. There's probably real-time visualization now, which I'll bet is pretty cool.
The math is the same, but in the thermal model you're calculating an equilibrium state to figure out the final temperature of each surface, or cyclic variation in the case of a rotating spacecraft with the sun and other emitting bodies around it. That tells you if temperatures are within the tolerance range of the components over the mission lifetime. If not, you have to add thermal protection and rerun the simulation.
This probably all goes a lot faster today than it did on the 1990's era VAX minicomputer I was using. There's probably real-time visualization now, which I'll bet is pretty cool.