In the beginning of the movie Wall-E, the robot works on the Earth gathering the trash. At some point he grips the space shattle and goes to the outer space. He functions equally ok both on Earth and in the space.
Can this happen in real life? Is it possible for our devices like phone, robotic vacuum cleaner or lantern to function in the space or is there any “earthly” conditions required?
If no, what are the requirements for a device to function in the space? What distinguishes a space shattle or satellite from a common lantern, making it usable in the space?
In: Engineering
Yes, but it is often a bad idea.
For example a common screwdriver will work just fine in space, but it is just as likely to strip the head on a fastener in space than it is on earth.
If you think dealing with a fastener with a stripped head is bad on earth, that is nothing compared to having to deal with it in space.
If you look at the International Space Station they use a lot of off the shelf devices. Your phone works just fine, even in a vacuum. When going on space walks the astronauts use their own personal watches and have mounted regular GoPro cameras to their helmet cover and use regular torches from the hardware store. A robotic vacuum does not work without gravity as it can not move around on its own. But the ISS have a regular vacuum that they use to clean on a regular basis. Naturally a vacuum cleaner does not clean in the vacuum of space, it does create a vacuum but it does not clean. There are exceptions though. If you talk about oil powered lantern and similar they do not work without gravity to power convection currents to supply the flame with fresh air. So these would not work in space. But most devices you can get your hands on works great in space.
It depends a lot on which condiations you mean.
Inside a spacecraft wehre everything is like on earth except gravity or outside a craft in the vacuum of space?
Most devices we have here on earth don’t require gravity to work right.
Some are designed to work with gravity, for example the refrigerator you have in your home likely would not work in Zero-G.
Most will work if not exactly as well as on earth.
Cooling would be an issue even inside a spacecraft where there is air.
For one thing most spacecraft aren’t pressurized to the same degree as here at ground level and have thinner air, but heat would not dissipate as easily. Hot air rises and dissipates. In micro gravity you might end up with the hot air simply building up around a devices instead of easily mixing with the rest of the air around it.
NASA had to rework the fans on the ThinkPad laptops they send up when they first put them on the SpaceStation for this reason.
Similarly exhaust gasses will build up around a device emitting them. Astronauts have to be careful when the sleep that they don’t end up being enveloped by their own exhaled air and choke on it. And any device that burns fuel would be similarly in danger of choking itself on its own exhaust.
Not that you should run anything that emits exhaust anywhere that counts as inside here on earth, but in microgravity it is worse.
Also if you do put a big fan on a device to help with dissipating heat and exhaust you have to be careful that it won’t become an engine moving it.
Anything involving water or any other liquid will not work as it should in zero-G where water instead of flowing down and gathering at the bottom will instead turn into floating balls of liquid that might stick to wherever they land.
On earth most devices that have a fan cooling them won’t fly of due to their own weight. In space if they are floating around they will just slowly be propelled forward.
The lack of gravity and air being completely still and fluids and dust etc behaving differently will mess with a lot of tools deigned for earth conditions, but most will work fine for a short while at least and well enough long term with some modification or precautions.
Outside a spacecraft things get worse.
Nothing that relies on air in any way will work right. Not oxygen can be burned and nothing will get cooled by air at all.
They say space is cold, but really it is a great insulator that keeps cold things cold and hot things hot and since everything generates heat while working, this becomes an issue.
Radiation is another big issue. even inside space craft unless they are heavily shielded and “heavy” is not most space craft can afford. Electronics especially modern ones don’t deal well with radiation like that. Older and specially hardened electronics are better equipped to deal with that.
There are also very weird things that happen in the vacuum of space that we never have to worry about here on earth.
Any machines that somehow relies on being lubricated somewhere as many things with moving parts do will run into trouble as any sort of liquid will start having weird things happen to it at zero pressure. you can find alternatives to that, but most earth based devices weren’t optimized to work with space-proof lubricants.
Other weird things that happen in the vacuum of space includes such things as vacuum welding, where two bits of metal that touch each other in vacuum will get stuck to each other. You can avoid that by carefully selecting which materials touch wich when designing devices with moving parts that get exposed to vacuum, like the hatches of space-craft that are supposed to open, but on earth nobody worries about that when designing machines.
Still most devices you have on earth will work for s short time inside spacecraft and some will work for at least a short while outside of spacecraft, but generally machines don’t do well under conditions they weren’t designed for.
Some electronics, notably spinning hard disk drives, require certain air pressures to function normally due to their sensitive moving parts.
Modern computers and phones use solid-state storage instead. There are certain parts of a modern phone that directly interact with the air and would either not work or might be damaged in the vacuum of space, such as a microphone, speaker, waterproof seal, motion sensor, etc, but the processor and other essentials should still turn on.
The batteries and temperature could be an issue but it is believable that a smartphone or laptop could work in space… for at least a little while.
As for a robot vacuum, they clean with a combination of gravity to hold them on the ground and airflow to suck up dirt. The electric motors would still spin the brushes (for a little while before battery or heat problems occurred) but even if you had something in space that you wanted to clean, it would not do that function well in space.
we use gravity in cooling, in that we expect hot air to rise. in zero gravity, hot air stays next to hot things unless you have a fan. so a toaster, say, would overheat and burnout the elements the first time you used it. any Electronics expected to passively cool would similarly fail, though perhaps not quite as fast.
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