No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Electronics have to be designed for use in outer space. That includes hardening from radiation. Adding redundancy because there will be glitches and failures due to bit flips. Using components that can operate in a vacuum. There's thermal considerations, both extreme heat and cold. You also need filters in the optics to protect the image sensor.
You can totally put a GoPro in space. It's just not going to last very long before it fails.
Can electronics dissipate a significant amount of heat in a vacuum? Obviously they will lose a small amount of heat to radiation, but here on Earth, our electronics dissipate the majority of the heat by making contact with air. This is by either using a fan to force air through the metal fins of a heat sink, or by passively letting the air touching the device carry heat away.
So how do electronics in space dissipate heat? A heat sink can only hold so much heat before it gets full.
Transferring heat to a part outside the system that is optimised to emit thermal radiation
Oh, nice. I guess I need to read up on that part.
But emit it to what? Vacuum cannot absorb heat.
There are 3 kinds of thermal transfer- conduction, convection, and radiation.
Conduction and convection are largely useless in space, all the heat basically stays in the same system, at most you can move it around do different parts of the same satellite/spacecraft, whatever, but you can't really get rid of it.
Which leaves you with radiation, which is not a particularly efficient way of getting rid of heat but you gotta work with what you got.
I cant give too detailed of an explanation because frankly it's a bit over my head, but this is where the stuff about infrared light being heat comes in. That's not technically true, after all, heat is basically vibrating atoms, and infrared light is photons, same as visible light just at a different frequency. Basically that vibration heat energy gets turned into photons and then just shoots off into space, essentially making all matter glow a bit in the infrared spectrum, and hotter things glow more.
And if/when those photons hit something else, it gets turned back into heat vibrations. Space is vast and mostly empty of course, so those photons could just keep flying through the void for eternity (I'm sure physicists could chime in and say no they don't and they actually lose energy and become some other kind of particle or something else crazy that's way above my head, but don't worry about that unless you're trying to be a physicist with a few years of college under your belt)
Lights work in space, so thermal radiation works in space. This is also the same way heat from the sun reaches us here on earth, there's obviously not a whole lot of matter between us and the sun for conduction or convection to carry the heat to us, it's just glowing and a bunch of those photons eventually hit us and make our atoms get all wiggly.
If you look at pictures of the ISS, in addition to solar panels, they also have big panels that serve as radiators to get rid of excess heat. They have coolant pumping through them to move heat from the rest of the station to the panels, but from the panel they're getting rid of it by just radiating it out into space. They're basically just sitting there glowing out all of the extra heat.
It a good thing there is no atmosphere between us and the sun. Apparently the noise would be deafening.