(urth) Like a good Neighbor

Gerry Quinn gerry at bindweed.com
Wed Nov 23 13:48:21 PST 2011



From: Lee Berman 

> Nah. Those tricks are for fighting cold temperatures on earth. None would work
> in outer space. The best ethylene glycol (car antifreeze) could do would be
> to stay liquid at -51C (at highly toxic levels, mind you). The void is -273 C.
Empty space has no temperature.  (Typically the interplanetary gases are very hot in fact, but so dilute their temperature is irrelevant.) How hot or cold an object in the vacuum gets depends largely on whether the sun is shining on it.  And since heat transfer is by radiation only (no conduction or convection) it will be relatively slow.  Probably inhumi spin so that an equal amount of sunlight falls on every side.
The average temperature of an object in space should be a little lower than the average temperature on a planetary surface, though, due to the absence of a greenhouse effect.
- Gerry Quinn

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