[Beowulf] Server Sky - Internet and computation in orbit

[Peter St. John]

Well I'm a lousy physicist, but how well does the Ultimate Heatsink
conduct? I was thinking that the CPU can radiate IR indefinitely, but
hotter CPU would need something to conduct the heat away, like air or water?
The temperature of the vacuum may be low, but that's not heat capacity,
right? But I'm sure right now some physicist laughs. Please speak up :-)
Peter

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 04:26:33PM -0400, Peter St. John wrote:
> > I'd love computation on the moon; just as good solar collection as orbit,
> > but radiation shielding from craters. But what about cooling? The article
> > sounded a bit glib. I'm thinking, unless there's appreciable available
> > water, computing in space will be limited to low GHz because heat
> > dissipation would be limited to IR radiation? There's no coolant in
> space,
> > right? How do satellites deal with that?
>
> The only hot spot is the sun, everything else is 4 K cold microwave
> background. The hotter you are, the more power you can dump into
> the ultimative heatsink (T^4, Boltzmann law
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law ).
>
> Shielding from the sun is easy, provided you can maintain
> the reflective shield alignment.
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