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Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?

nasa.gov

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Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?

#121
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't space actually not cold at all -- there's barely any matter there to have a temperature?

Good question. How does heat radiation work in space? Seems the answer is that you don't need matter for heat radiation.

You don't need it but it's useful.

Normal convective cooling (think your computers CPU or your phone's backside) or evaporative cooling (sweat on your skin, discardable heatsinks) work by transferring heat to some medium. In case of CPUs you do it twice, once from CPU to metal and then from metal to Air to get a larger cooling surface.

In space you don't get that, or atleast not without having it be expensive af. The only way to loose heat energy is by radiating it away naturally (infrared light that our bodies like to emit carries heat away from our body).

This is very slow and requires a very different cooler design and some design metrics overall (if your CPU points it's heat surface at some other components of the craft, that component might overheat due to that).

Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?

#122
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about the foam, too. Normally, foam contains a lot of air. But that kind of foam will blow itself apart in a vacuum. How do they make foam where all the air pockets are replaced with vacuum? Is vacuum-filled foam a better or worse insulator than air-filled foam?

Normally, foam contains a lot of air. But that kind of foam will blow itself apart in a vacuum. In the video, Thermal Protection System Engineer Betsy Congdon says it's 97% "air." I can't say whether it's actually air, or she's simplifying things for the general public or not. She also says twice that "water" is used in the radiators. But I'd have to believe that NASA's using something that absorbs/dissipates heat a…

They used deionized water, not unusual for gaming rigs either.

The temperature range is about 15C to 125C, at high pressure this is most ideal for use with water and water itself is a rather good coolant.

Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?

#123

Towards the end, it says: > “After launch, Parker Solar Probe will detect the position of the Sun, align the thermal protection shield to face it and continue its journey for the next three months, embracing the heat of the Sun and protecting itself from the cold vacuum of space.” What a phenomenal piece of engineering! The article was not only fascinating to read as a non-astronomer/lay person, but it also makes it…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't space actually not cold at all -- there's barely any matter there to have a temperature?

From the article:

> One key to understanding what keeps the spacecraft and its instruments safe, is understanding the concept of heat versus temperature. Counterintuitively, high temperatures do not always translate to actually heating another object.

> In space, the temperature can be thousands of degrees without providing significant heat to a given object or feeling hot. Why? Temperature measures how fast particles are moving, whereas heat measures the total amount of energy that they transfer. Particles may be moving fast (high temperature), but if there are very few of them, they won’t transfer much energy (low heat). Since space is mostly empty, there are very few particles that can transfer energy to the spacecraft.

So space has high temperature, but since matter is far apart the temperature isn't transferred very much.

Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?

#124
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about the foam, too. Normally, foam contains a lot of air. But that kind of foam will blow itself apart in a vacuum. How do they make foam where all the air pockets are replaced with vacuum? Is vacuum-filled foam a better or worse insulator than air-filled foam?

Normally, foam contains a lot of air. But that kind of foam will blow itself apart in a vacuum. In the video, Thermal Protection System Engineer Betsy Congdon says it's 97% "air." I can't say whether it's actually air, or she's simplifying things for the general public or not. She also says twice that "water" is used in the radiators. But I'd have to believe that NASA's using something that absorbs/dissipates heat a…

The only substance that can transport more energy than water that I know of is ammonia. But it's quite corrosive and it has to be pressurized at 50-100 bar to make a difference.

Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?

#125
It blows my mind to think that we DO have materials that can withstand such temperatures, even after understanding the part about heat transfer.

I hope that kind of materials can be mass-produced on the short term future to be used as insulation for homes!

Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?

#126
post #117
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. How does heat radiation work in space? Seems the answer is that you don't need matter for heat radiation.

Convection doesn't work in space, so you only lose heat to radiation. Space is cold, but it doesn't feel cold.

(Natural) convection doesn't work in free-fall. That includes the Vomit Comet[1], the ISS, the Apollo capsule between the Earth and the Moon, and so on.

Fans/blowers can drive covection artificially, though.

Convection (natural or artificial) doesn't work in the absence of a convecting fluid, even when not in free-fall.

Definitely not space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdJwG_9kF8s from about the 3 min 40 second mark.

(FWIW, the slinky stuff is also really cool; weight -- in the contact[1] sense but not in the mg sense -- is dissipational, and it's nice to see that demonstrated, so I'm glad your comment caught my attention.)

> space does not feel cold

If any part of you which you expose to space (if it's shielded from solar heating, etc.) is moist -- your skin, your eyes, your tongue, the insides of your nose -- you will feel that part getting cold very quickly thanks to evaporative cooling, which works very well in free-fall and in the absence of a convecting fluid.

- --

[1] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Weight/whatIsW...

Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?

#127
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the cool side of the craft will stay cool by radiating its heat away into space.

Is there a limit to the amount of heat a body of space can transmit via black-body radiation? I wonder if the performance of the heat transfer is going to be a useful measurement for science on this mission. I would think so. I just can't help but wonder how much heat an area of space near a star can have added to it. Is it infinite? Is the limit so high that it's far beyond even the atmosphere of a sun? And are ther…

> Is there a limit to the amount of heat a body of space can transmit via black-body radiation?

There's a limit on the rate, rather than the amount, given by the Stefan-Boltzmann law. There will be grey body corrections for the heat shield.

Some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body#Radiative_cooling

Some even more gory details (slide 21 gives a sort of grey body curve; slides 108-113 are directly relevant; slides 34, 36 & 37 form a handy quick reference; slide 86 has a couple of graphs about foams):

http://www.ltas-vis.ulg.ac.be/cmsms/uploads/File/2015_10_21_...

and already that's more than I will ever really want to know, but this is probably of interest as a stepping stone for other HN readers. :-)

> how much heat an area of space near a star can have added to it

The region of space near a sun-like star generally has heat passing through it, starwards->infinity. Not much sticks around, and certainly not for very long.

There are limits on how much heat can be in the outer atmosphere of stars can be; the important thing is that "heat" here involves the presence of an amount substance, as well as how the average bit of substance in the region is moving in relation to other bits of substance in the same region ("temperature"). The limits are complicated because matter will tend to be blown away by the flux of radiation from the star through the outer atmosphere. The Eddington Limit is relevant here; Eddington's equation describes how radiation drives winds through a stellar atmosphere, to the limit where it blows the atmosphere out "to infinity".

The outer atmospheres of stars with atypically strong magnetic fields can be Super-Eddington, as can those around compact objects like neutron stars. Black hole accretion discs can also be Super-Eddington and the matter in the inner portions may get hot enough to disintegrate into gamma rays. This is called a "[big] blue bump", and implies temperatures of a hundred megakelvins to a few hundred gigakelvins or so (quasars have the very hot bits around them), although the temperature in much of the disc will struggle to reach a megakelvin.

> Is it infinite? Is the limit so high that it's far beyond even the atmosphere of a sun?

We've seen the "yes" answer to the second question.

The first is straight forward: high heat ~ high energy, and if you put enough energy into a small enough volume, it collapses into a black hole. It's easier to do this with a large amount of relatively low-temperature matter instead of a smaller amount of much higher-temperature matter.

> And are there special areas of space where the heat limit has reached its maximum and if so what does that mean for the properties of that space?

Black holes probably exist, given observations to date. Stellar mass ones are very cold. We have no evidence for black holes much smaller than our sun. They would be warmer, and would become very hot for extremely low-mass black holes. Here cold and warm relate to the very blackbody-like spectrum of the Hawking Radiation they emit. (~ nanokelvins or less. As said above, the accretion disc material can have much higher temperature).

The deepest layers of neutron stars are extreeeeemely hot (~ terakelvins). So are the outer layers. If they collapse, that heat is locked up within the black hole.

Pair-instability supernovae are the next hottest thing you can have, probably. In those, it's so hot in the core that the light produced as nuclei bump into each other is heavy in gamma radiation; a little hotter and you get gamma rays hot enough to turn right back into electron-positron pairs. (~ tens of gigakelvins). The heavy outer layers of the star then crash inwards as they lose their support from the outward pressure of the light (back to Eddington again). Kaboom! The Kaboom is likely so massive that not enough matter is left in the vicinity of the former star to leave a remnant like a neutron star or black hole. The matter thrown out of such a supernova can have ridiculously high temperatures, but rapidly become sparse enough that the heat per cubic metre drops off to nearly nothing. Hot protons arrive at Earth from such explosions as very-high energy cosmic rays, and when detectors pick them up lots of astronomers will get paged.

Penultimately some things which have very high temperature, but not much heat (because there's not much matter at that temperature; it's stray wispy sparse particles with lots of empty space between them. The products of smashed-together lead ions at the LHC is in exakelvins. Depending on model, the temperature of dark matter in active galactic nuclei can be in zetakelvins. The daughter products of the highest-energy cosmic rays smashing into atoms in our atmosphere can be in yottakelvins. If we could collapse a spherical shell of photons into a black hole (a "kugelblitz"), the final temperature before the black hole appeared would be on the scale of the Planck temperature, meaning hundreds of millions of yottakelvins.

Finally, the extremely early universe probably had regions of higher temperatures still. Nothing we know prevents the temperature of the big bang from being infinite. However, nearly everyone hopes that quantum gravity would abolish that infinity by e.g. gravitational radiation undergoes a phase change in dense ultra-high but finite temperature regions, kind-of like how pair-instability supernovae's innermost pressures drop at their temperature maximum when super-hot gamma rays change into electron-positron pairs.

Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if the foam cells have a vacuum in them (in? lack of?) how does it not implode when on earth.

The difference between Vacumn and 1atm is 14psi, bike tires pumped to between 50-120psi (on my road bike for example), 14 psi isn't that large a pressure for a reasonably strong/stiff material.

I know what you mean but in a way I think there is a difference since the material has to withstand inward pressure; compressive forces.

A tire/tyre rubber has tensile strength, most (all?) pressure vessels on earth are tensile. It seems odd the difference between compression and tension when it comes to certain forces.

Anyway, I just though it would matter.

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