Space radiators dump heat by light

Transcript

In space, convection and conduction are almost gone, so heat escapes mainly as radiation: electromagnetic waves, often infrared, sent from the hardware into deep space. Engineers move that heat with heat pipes or pumped fluid loops to radiator panels, which are coated to radiate strongly and absorb little sunlight. That is why space data centers are limited by radiator size and mass, especially at high power levels, where heat rejection becomes a dominant engineering problem.