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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Depends on what you consider reasonable. If you’re a researcher, Thorlabs has a couple for <$30k. You could also build your own, but you probably wouldn’t be asking if you had the experience necessary to do this.

    If you’re a hobbyist, building your own would be an impressive project that would teach you a lot (look up spontaneous parametric down-conversion, a common way to create entangled pairs). It would also be pricey, as you would need an appropriate laser source (probably a nanosecond pulsed laser), a non-linear crystal like BBO, and a lot of miscellaneous optical components, etc. You can get this stuff second hand online for a lot cheaper than new, but it would still cost a lot for an individual. You would also need to characterize your output to ensure you’re actually getting correlated pairs, which is outside of my expertise.



  • In principle, you could have a system designed to image your surroundings (using cameras, LIDAR, etc) and perhaps some kind of machine learning algorithm to predict what kind of sound would be expected if the events around you were occurring in atmosphere. I imagine this could work well for simple things like a tool hitting a piece of metal, but would be probably run into issues when the events are affected by the lack of atmosphere or give little or no visual indication that they are occurring. And, of course, you wouldn’t be able to “hear” anything outside of the view of your imaging system.


  • Heat can transfer through conduction (basically thermal diffusion through physical contact), convection (bulk motion of matter, like gas or water flow), and radiation. For a spacecraft in low Earth orbit, the pressure is considered ultra-high vacuum, so you basically only have radiation to dissipate heat. Near room temperature, this would be mid-infrared light. The energy in everyday sound waves is very small, so body heat, on-board instruments, sunlight, and perhaps even IR emission from the Earth would be much more important contributors to heat build-up. However, regardless of the heat sources involved, there will always be some equilibrium temperature where the energy going into the system equals the energy radiating away.

    To keep things comfortable for the crew on the ISS, there are passive and active systems to regulate the temperature [1]. For dissipating excess heat, large radiators are used. These are basically panels with a large surface area in order to maximize emission of thermal radiation. A closed-loop system is used to circulate fluid, which collects and transfers heat to these radiators. Water is used for some parts, but others have pipes on the outside that use ammonia to prevent freezing. The radiators themselves can be retracted or deployed as needed.

    [1] Memi, E. G. “Active Thermal Control System (ATCS) Overview.” (2006): 19.



  • Yes, sound is the collective motion of particles in the form of a compression wave. As these waves propagate through a material and scatter off boundaries and inhomogeneities in general, they become less ordered and eventually indistinguishable from random atomic motion (i.e. thermal energy). However, in addition to this, sound waves can radiate away when in atmosphere. In the case of spacecraft, they can only dissipate into thermal energy and can therefore persist much longer. This is actually a problem engineers have to deal with, as unwanted vibrations can cause issues. There’s research looking into addressing this by using materials specifically designed to be highly absorbent to sound waves at particular frequencies (i.e. the collective motion of atoms at particular frequencies rapidly decays into random thermal motion).