…in what proximity would you have to be to the sun and how fast would you have to be spinning (like a rotisserie chicken) so that your light side didn’t burn and your dark side didn’t freeze; rotating just enough to keep a relatively stable temperature?
Absolutely absurd, I know but this question somehow popped into my head and won’t leave. 😆🐔🔥🧊
As an earthling, you have evolved over the course of billions of years to deal with sunlight at a distance of one astronomical unit. That’s the distance of the earth’s orbit. That’s probably the most comfortable distance.
The Apollo moon missions used a so-called “barbecue” mode that rotated the capsules at three revolutions per hour. They did this during the 3-4 day coast phases to and from the moon. As far as I know this was able to mostly hold the interior temperatures in the “survivable” range.
…plus a planet’s magnetic field, plus a few kilometers of atmosphere!
That’s a good starting point, but caveats:
My bet is that most of our thermal circulation is via the movement of our blood. That’s probably not directly analogous to spacecraft.
If one isn’t just talking thermal, we do burn at 1AU. Go lie in the sun without cover long enough – especially if you’re pale-skinned – long enough, and you’ll get burned. Without the atmosphere, we’d be hit by more UV light, too.
Agreed. With no suit or any other thermal management tech, it’s going to be hard to survive anywhere just on thermal grounds alone.
However, let’s say you want to mitigate problems with sunburn and climb to a higher solar orbit. I haven’t calculated anything. But my intuition says you’re no longer getting enough heat input, and you will end up freeze dried. (The dried part is a vacuum effect we were told to ignore.)
Without the atmosphere, UV is going to be among the least dangerous wavelengths for you to have to worry about.
looks puzzled
I don’t think that it mostly stops more-energetic stuff.
Hmm.
Are you thinking of the magnetosphere rather than the atmosphere? I didn’t mention that, but I guess that’d also be a factor.
The atmosphere stops a lot of the high energy stuff. It gets absorbed, and turned into a shower of lower energy particles.
I remember reading once about an astronaut seeing blue flashes in their eyes. When they realised, they got behind the water tank sharpish. It was high energy particles passing through their eyeballs.