zlacker

>>angadh+(OP)
I worked in aerospace for a couple of years in the beginning of my career. While my area of expertise was the mechanical design I shared my office with the guy who did the thermal design and I learned two things:

1. Satellites are mostly run at room temperature. It doesn't have to be that way but it simplifies a lot of things.

2. Every satellite is a delicately balanced system where heat generation and actively radiating surfaces need to be in harmony during the whole mission.

Preventing the vehicle from getting too hot is usually a much bigger problem than preventing it from getting too cold. This might be surprising because laypeople usually associate space with cold. In reality you can always heat if you have energy but cooling is hard if all you have is radiation and you are operating at a fixed and relatively low temperature level.

The bottom line is that running a datacenter in space makes not much sense from a thermal standpoint and there must be other compelling reasons for a decision to do so.

>>weinzi+N31
What is room temperature in this context? The temp of the space it's sitting in or a typical room temp on Earth?

>>nusl+ka1
Room temperature on earth. In physics room temperature is used as a technical term and actually pretty universally defined as 20°C (293.15 K).

Traditionally in European papers it used to be 18°C, so if Einstein and Schrödinger talk about room temperature it is that.

I've heard in chemistry and stamp collecting they use 25°C but that is heresy.