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. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
