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Comment by astrobe_ | Hacker News Reader

I guess it's not the kind of instrument that one can turn on and off?

TFA says "keep the [probe] warm"; I'm not sure if it's poetry or a necessity; on Earth electronic components guaranteed to operate for maybe -100 °C ~ 100 °C at best but here one must be close to 0 °K.

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I don't see why it would be cold. It's been in the vacuum of space for decades, it's had nowhere to dissipate heat. One of the main challenges in outer space is dissipating heat, not keeping things warm. People freezing when they fall into the vacuum of space is pure fiction: that would only happen near an atmosphere.

Topical - that’s the problem to solve for orbital data centers

You still have radiative transfer. The instruments in question probably take significantly less power in than they lose through radiation. So they need to be given extra power to maintain temperature. I.e. they need to be heated.

The heat is dissipated by radiation, that's why apart of solar panels all sattelites and space stations also have radiators for thermal management. The average space temperature (far away from stars) is 2.7K (the temperature of cosmic microwave background, CMB), so going below that is hard. Sun would heat up a bit Voyager 2 but at 143au it is just 1/143^2 fraction of solar power on Earth orbit, thus 0.0049%, or just 0.067W/m^2, so extra power is needed to maintain electronics operational.

It has everywhere to dissipate heat, but only radiatively. But 140 AU from the Sun, there's not much incoming radiant flux.

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