ISS Coolant Pump Restarted After Successful Spacewalks 19
Yesterday, two astronauts completed a seven hour spacewalk to finish installation of a spare coolant pump after a failed coolant pump forced a partial shut down of the ISS. As of late yesterday afternoon, that pump is online and operating normally: "The new pump now is considered fully functional, but it will take some time to fully reintegrate the pump and Loop A of the two-loop external cooling system. Teams at mission control are following a schedule that should allow the restored cooling loop to be fully activated and integrated into the station’s cooling system on Christmas Day, Dec. 25. ... Electrical systems that depend on cooling from Loop A will be repowered or moved back from temporary support on Loop B gradually on Thursday, Friday, and throughout the weekend."
Not so hot any more (Score:3, Funny)
That's cool.
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It's just to keep the astronauts cool in case they ever have to land the ISS on the sun and can't wait for night time. Duh.
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I'm not so sure about that. I thought that the close-to-vacuum of space does not conduct heat that well. The "low" temperature of space just means whatever particles happen to be there on average don't move all that fast. Without a cooling system, the only way for the electronics to lose excess heat is by black-body radiation, which is totally insufficient relative to the rate at which heat is generated (think of your mobile phone, PC, laptop or TV and how hot they get).
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Yours,
Armchair engineer
part
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I sit-in-the-armchair corrected.
Happy Holidays.
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As fisted said, you apparently fell for a gag, but no biggie. Since you're interested in the subject, here are a few additional details.
Vacuum itself has no temperature, because temperature is a measure of the motion of particles, and there are none. Space is not a perfect vacuum, having very roughly one particle of one sort or another per cubic meter, and in principle you could calculate a temperature based on their motion, but it would never exchange any meaningful amount of heat with an object.
Vacuum wi
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Without a cooling system, the only way for the electronics to lose excess heat is by black-body radiation, which is totally insufficient relative to the rate at which heat is generated (think of your mobile phone, PC, laptop or TV and how hot they get).
Electronics exposed to the vacuum of space, will still be bolted to the ISS somehow, so can use the structure as heatsink. Electronics inside the ISS can use air cooling in addition to that.
For the structure as a whole, black body radiation will be the only way to get rid of excess heat (unless they'd pump excess heat into something, and toss that out. Which seems impractical to say the least :-).
But there can be big temperature differences depending on what's white/reflective or dark, and what's facing the
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Electronics exposed to the vacuum of space, will still be bolted to the ISS somehow, so can use the structure as heatsink.
Well, sort of. Electronics bolted to the ISS can conduct waste heat to the structure, but the heat still needs somewhere to go-- what you're just saying is that it can use the thermal conductivity of the ISS structure as a heat pipe, and the structure of the ISS as a radiator. Which is theoretically true, but there's only a limited amount of heat you can get rid of that way.
Electronics inside the ISS can use air cooling in addition to that.
Again, air "cooling" can move heat around, but it still has to go somewhere, which ultimately means it needs to be radiated to space.
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Space is cool again? That's cool.
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I shouldn't mention that, lest the ultra-conservatives conclude this is perverting the wide-eyed youth and decide the to slash the NASA budget.
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<cue: cheey 70s synth music>
Plans for a replacement? (Score:1)
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An article in CSM noted that it weighs 780 pounds and is about the size of a refrigerator
The first Space-x resupply mission carried nearly 2000 pounds... so weight is not an issue with putting another backup in place, not certain about dimensions
The cooling pumps are part of the 'big 12' systems that must be running for the ISS to function. I would imagine that the backup plans have backup plans which have their own backup plans
What about the spacesuit? (Score:2)
They kept having problems with it and I'm much more interested in how they plan to resolve that set of issues.