Scarlett156 said, "That thing gave me nightmares for YEARS after I first saw it."
Commodore Matt Decker!! I thought the Doomsday Machine killed you. How did you survive? You changed your name to Scarlett156?
Posted on 04/08/2022 9:36:36 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Nice article, no lies detected, no wokeness, concise, interesting, inspirational, a refreshing reminder of how things can be.
Maybe because it is made to sense the infrared spectrum, that it might pick up heat easily whenever it momentarily faces the sun, then requiring a cool down before becoming functional again.
it is definitely the Doomsday machine. But it’s a different aspect than I’ve ever seen. Is it from a new, remastered and digitized edition?
Seriously, I will never forget the first time I saw that. I didn’t care about the “star trek” company or brand or whatever. I was so terrorized by it that my mind just froze.
My understanding is that it must NEVER EVER face the sun, even for an instant. The sensitive instruments would be destroyed.
Its orbit around the L2 point combined with the annual revolution around the sun, allow it to examine all parts of the universe, except Earth, since in order to view Earth, it would be facing toward the sun.
When it left earth the telescope was too warm to do it’s job, and the only way to get rid of heat in space is to radiate it away. There’s no convection, no cool breezes (ha!), etc., and radiating heat away is comparatively slow. As far as the ambient temperature of deep interstellar space, I always thought it was just a few degrees above absolute zero. But this close to the sun, it’s another story.
That’s just what I think. I could definitely be wrong about all this. Someone correct me if I am, thx!
Two things from the world of sci-fi really freaked me out - Those bug-eyed aliens in ‘Killers from Space’, and the Zanti Misfits’ from the original Outer Limits series.
Well, it looks as though you are right. Space is cold but near gas giants is very hot.
I remember reading space was in the 70 degrees, though. I guess that was an old article when they didn’t know better, many years ago? Or I dreamt that whole thing up, lol.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/space-news/what-is-the-temperature-in-space-and-why/686238
Sounds like it’s going through menopause.
What could possibly go wrong?
Yes
William Wimdom beamed everybody down, then...
Well Matt Decker only flew in a shuttle craft.
Captain Kirk went in with the melted plastic NCC-1701.
“Gentleman, beam me aboard!”
😜
It’s a great link.
I’ve had it open in my browser since day 1 of this mission.
Fascinating telescope and deployment.
I am guessing a bit here based on space radio reception knowledge. I think, whether it’s RF or IR or any other sensor, it’s about getting adequate signal to noise to be able to ‘detect’.
Cosmic space background noise, which can be measured in temperature or dB (there is a conversion), averages about 2.7 deg kelvin, just above absolute zero. That’s empty space. Add stars and other stuff into the background and the average bumps up to about 30 or 40 deg kelvin. If you were looking at the Earth, the reradiated heat is about 270 deg kelvin. There is a dependency on wavelength as well. The sun puts out about 10k kelvin at our distance from it here.
So to detect for example some star dust 13 billion light years from here that has a temperature seen from here of 40 degrees kelvin, which is lost in the average background, the sensor needs to be cold enough, several degrees colder, to sense the difference. It also needs to be able to be focused enough to not let nearby hotter stuff saturate the picture and drown out what you’re trying to observe.
That’s an explanation from an RF engineers perspective.
I checked it out on YouTube, and you are right and I was wrong.
My grey matter ain’t what it used to be, I’m afraid.🙂
Sorry about that.
My apologies to you, I was wrong!
No worries! Have a blessed day!
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