Yeah the amount of heat a data center vs a satellite your going to super heat the space in that orbit over time. It they are geostationary then its even harder as the the data center doesn’t move away from the heat.
Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
Fermion@mander.xyz 1 week agoWith radiators just like with every existing satellite system.
Very large scale datacenters would likely have some nasty fluid handling problems to solve.
lordnikon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
erin@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Geostationary satellites are not standing still. They’re orbiting the Earth at the same rate that it rotates “beneath” them.
nabladabla@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Um, it doesn’t make the data center in orbit thing make sense, but a geostationary satellite absolute moves at high speed and does not stay in the same place in space.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The heat would be moving at the same speed. Though, that does mean it wouldn’t be any better in any other orbit.
Fermion@mander.xyz 1 week ago
Heat energy is primarily dissipated as infrared light which moves at the speed of light. There is no way for space to accumulate heat. If that were the case the entire solar system would be unlivable. The IR emitted by satellites is truly negligible in comparison to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the sun.
nabladabla@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Again, it doesn’t help the case, but just… no. The heat gets out of the spacecraft by radiating, and radiation doesn’t move in a circular orbit around Earth, it moves at speed of light outwards from where it started.
Fermion@mander.xyz 1 week ago
Radiators in space work by radiating electromagnetic energy(light). Heat can only accumulate in matter, not in space, so that is definitely not one of the things we need to worry about.
wewbull@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Super heat what in that space? The point is there’s nothing to transfer heat to. All you can do is radiate infra-red light.
teft@piefed.social 1 week ago
geostationary then its even harder as the the data center doesn’t move away from the heat.
Geostationary would leave the satellite in shadow anytime it was night time over the part of the earth since a geostationary orbit is stationary in the sky over a given point at the equator.
That doesn’t solve any of the cooling problems just saying that you do get some shadow at geostationary orbits.
There are other orbits that get less shadow though.
wewbull@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Devial@discuss.online 1 week ago
Have you seen the size of the radiators on the ISS ? And that’s just what needed for cooling of body heat for 9 people and basic computer and support equipment.
A data center that is actively pumping out massive amounts of heat would need humongous radiator panels.
XLE@piefed.social 1 week ago
And you can only build so many of those radiator panels before you start running into congestion problems. You don’t want them radiating onto each other.
Devial@discuss.online 1 week ago
And those radiator panels are heavy and big, therefore enormously expensive to launch, and vulnerable to micro meteorites and other orbital debris.
Fermion@mander.xyz 1 week ago
The area of radiator needed directly corresponds to the amount of power harvested by the solar panels. It doesn’t matter what the load is. So a compute frame with the same amount of solar panels as the space station would need approximately the same radiatot area as the ISS, unless you are bringing nuclear power into the mix.
I agree that space based datacenters are a bad idea, but the thermals really are not the gotcha people are making them out to be.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The solar panels needed is another problem for the space data center fantasy. Once you put together all the mass over enough surface area to make it work, you would blot out the sun worldwide.
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They’re called fins. Not panels.
Devial@discuss.online 1 week ago
What, thought your comment was so amazing you had to repost it after the first for removed for you being a dick ?
Go touch grass, dude.