zlacker

> sure space is cold

Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is pretty useless in the shade.

>>adastr+(OP)
The solar labels are in the sun. Behind them they are in the shade.

>>hdgvhi+Ag
In close proximity, and connected to metal structures radiating & conducting heat at 120 degrees. You still have to expel that heat somehow, and route it around the spacecraft core.

>>hdgvhi+Ag
The energy collected from the solar panels must be converted into heat in the AI chips. It's really like putting the AI chips directly into the sun, just with extra steps. Sunlight gets transformed into electricity which gets transformed into heat in the chips.

>>adastr+ph
I think stopping the heat conductivity is a solved problem - space telescopes manage to do this. But all in all, cooling in space remains a very big challenge.

>>hdgvhi+Ag
They actually need the entirety of the backside of the panels to cool them - if not they would literally burn out from the accumulated heat from being exposed to the sun.

>>Tepix+FW
No, it isn’t solved. The James Webb telescope was shipped with cryogenic coolant, and put in an orbit in the shadow of the moon far from the radiating earth. Once it runs out in a few years, it’s done.

>>DalasN+vU
So the satelite receives say 13kW of heat energy as it has a 10 square metre surface facing the sun.

That is converted to 2.5kW electic and 10.5kW heat. The electric is then used to power the computer and ply doom or whatever. That 2.5kW of electric is then converted to 2.5kW of heat. That means the satelite has to dissipate 13kW of heat.

But even without the electric use it still receives 13kW of heat and dissipates 13kW of heat.

Any object in space will emit as much energy via radiation as it receives otherwise it will continue to increase in temperature. The question is thus what temperature does it sit at to make this in equilibrium.

If the satelite was perfectly flat it would run at 120c for a black body. If it was a lump of stew it would be about 150c.

To reduce that to 20C you need about 50sqm radistor, or 5 times the surface area in shadow. The shadow is about 350-400m long

So you build it as a cone with the flat circular area facing the sun and the pointy area in its shadow you’d only need a cone height of about 20m to emit enough heat to keep the satelite to room temperature.