[ale] [OT] grounding in space

Jim Kinney jim.kinney at gmail.com
Mon Aug 28 17:05:45 EDT 2017


On Mon, 2017-08-28 at 16:55 -0400, Phil Turmel wrote:
> On 08/28/2017 01:50 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> > The (bs) EMP bags made me think (usually a good thing!) about
> > circuit
> > design (a field I'm not good in).
> > 
> > For a spacecraft, the obvious choice for ground plane is the craft
> > framework itself. Relative to the typical power loads in the
> > various
> > modules on ISS, the frame is a "near infinite supply or sink of
> > electrons".
> > 
> > But space weather is nasty. Solar flares are huge problems. How is
> > a
> > system designed to withstand an EM flux greater than the typical
> > power
> > throughput? On the ground, we use fat braided copper wires and
> > deeply
> > buried rods. That's not an option on a satellite. Thick skin can
> > shield. What else?
> 
> You don't shield everything.  You shield the ICs with as small a
> shell
> as possible, and every other circuit in the whole spacecraft is a
> precision engineered tightly twisted pair w/ carefully balanced
> current
> flows.  Both power and signal.  Plus optical isolation between any
> devices grounded to different parts of the structure.

My original grad school interest was the physics side of
optronics/digital optics - making switching materials out of purely
optical components.
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-- 
James P. Kinney III

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you
gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his
own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain

http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
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