Crazy Thermal Space Ship Stuff…

Did you know that the mars express mission (the one with beagle and the rover) had a very special CCD (digital camera) on it?
Well it did, in fact it so damn special it needs to be cooled down to -180 degrees C, and as we’re using it for our spacecraft specification, that means I have to cool it down to -180 degrees C.

This you may naively think, should be easy as space has a working temperature of about 3K.

But all the other equipment in the space craft has to be kept at -20 to +20 degrees C….

I.e. the internal temperature of the space craft has to be kept at room temp….

So I’ve been  up with some radiator designs to keep it cool, essentially thermally coupling it to a piece of metal protruding out into space…

At the moment it’s about 10 meters squared, the POWER cells ain’t 10 meters squared… This makes me unhappy  may need to invest in some heat pipe technology as well…

 So anyway I’m going to emerse my sorry ass in ex-cell spread sheets…