[X] My Assistant

[tanjent]

There is a recent posting on Emily's Planetary Society blog, which must be Doug's because she's not there herself, although her name is the only name on it. The subject is using water to cool a long-lived surface probe on Venus. It sounds far more practical than any of the other proposals for landing giant atomic-powered refrigerators, or developing a whole new family of high-temperature semiconductors, etc.

But I didn't understand the whispered criticism to the effect that the Ekonomov paper assumed that the water would absorb heat only from the one watt of power driving the instrument package itself. I simply can't believe that he went to the podium and presented his model without taking into account the fact that the surface of Venus is a pretty hot place, and that the proposed probe would be absorbing the ambient heat. This is an interesting proposal and I would like to understand both the original calculation of 50 days to bring the water to a boil, and the cited flaw in the calculation. I too find it hard to believe that it would take 50 days to bring water to a boil on the Venusian surface, but where exactly is the error, and what remains after we correct it?

Doug is busy of course, but I hope he will find the time to address this when he returns, if someone else hasn't done so by then.