3 ms·
James Webb, being an infrared telescope, has to be extremely cold: It's Mid-Infrared Instrument is actively cooled to 7°K (-266°C). Most other instruments (NIR
by Tepix 9mo ago
James Webb, being an infrared telescope, has to be extremely cold: It's Mid-Infrared Instrument is actively cooled to 7°K (-266°C).
Most other instruments (NIRCam, NIRSpec, FGS/NIRISS) operate at about 40 Kelvin (-233°C) using only passive cooling (i.e. the sunshield).
Clearly this would be cold enough for a data center. Clearly the sunshield can be very well thermally insulated from the rest of the telescopy. The sun-facing side is up to 300°C hot. The cold side is -233°C.
I'm not saying radiating the heat from the GPUs is a solved problem. Just the thermal insulation between the solar panels and the rest of the spacecraft.
- shagie 9mo agoThere's very little on JWST that makes it hot. Furthermore, the spacecraft bus where the non-scientific instruments exist) is on the other side of the sunshade so that the waste heat from the RAD750 (a single processor clocked at 118 MHz - PowerPC 750 architecture (Macintosh computers in '97) that uses 5 watts of power designed to operate -55°C to 125°C) doesn't interfere with the scientific instruments. Putting an AI rack there is a completely different scale of power and cooling than what JWST uses.
- Tepix 9mo agoYes. Radiating heat away is a big problem - I totally agree! But stopping heat conduction is a solved problem! Consider the temperature of your pot handles. That‘s all I was saying.