Here is a cool selfie shot by Aki Hoshide aboard the International Space Station.
Looking in the reflection in his helmet, it appears that the camera he’s using is not an off-the-shelf variety such as what he’d buy at Best Buy (or the Japanese equivalent). But if he’d brought his iPhone5 up there, I’m assuming it would freeze and become useless in the cold vacuum of space, right? If he had his phone with him on board, would he be able to make & receive calls to his wife & kids back home in Tokyo? Does the ISS have equipment up there that enables them to receive cell phone signals? Does AT&T 4G LTE extend into space?
No cell signals can possibly get there. However, they do have some form of internet up there. I’m not sure if there is WiFi, though. If there was some wifi, then he might be able to use a VoIP app to place calls. But I’m not sure if there would be enough bandwidth…maybe stick to texting.
The only problem electronics have with cold is that, first, they can get moisture condensing on them, and second, the batteries don’t work as well. The first would be a complete nonissue in vacuum, and the second wouldn’t be an immediate issue: They’d still work for a while, at least. In fact, many types of electronic devices, including the CCDs that are at the heart of a camera, work better in the cold.
Meanwhile, it’s also not all that cold in space, either. It can be cold, if you’re shielded from the Sun or very far away from it, but if you’re getting sunlight about half the time, and you’re at about the same distance from the Sun as the Earth is (both of which are true for the ISS), your average equilibrium temperature will be about the same as the Earth’s (after all, the Earth is itself an object in space).
Honestly, I expect the biggest difficulty in using an iPhone for a shot like the one in the OP would be that the touchscreen probably wouldn’t register touches by pressure suit gauntlets, and even if it did, you still have really fat fingers. This wouldn’t be a problem at all inside the station, however, and all of the non-phone functions of the device should work just fine.
Conduction and convection both require a medium to transfer heat through. A vacuum by definition has no medium. Therefore, it would only lose heat through radiation. Further, anything in sunlight in space is likely to get quite toasty rather than freezing solid.
The phone’s battery would eventually wear out and go cold without insulation, but it would not instantly turn into an ice cube like on TV.
Here is some information on the camera used for ISS spacewalks, and there are more photos here.
Evidently it’s a standard Nikon D2Xs with some lubricant replaced with vacuum-compatible lubricant, and covered with a thermal blanket. So it is exposed to vacuum. I think the thermal blanket is a standard NASA regulation, to make sure any hardware the astronauts might touch doesn’t get excessively hot or cold.
But they had to put the Nikon SB-800 external flash in an airtight (pressurized) case, and they don’t explain exactly why. Some possibilities I can think of are:
[ul]
[li]Overheating. Most electronics rely on air for cooling, and they may overheat when used in vacuum. [/li][li]Coronal discharge. When high voltage is used at very low low pressure (low-grade vacuum), it can arc (spark). It’s not a problem with good vacuum, but if the flash is turned on accidentally while the airlock is at very low pressure, it might cause a problem.[/li][li]Capacitors. Electrolytic capacitors are usually avoided for vacuum.[/li][/ul]
Do cell phones handle vacuum well? I always thought the batteries would leak or something. In addition, being exposed to radiation in space and plastics off gassing might cause problems.
I’m surprised at how quickly cold can drain a phone battery. My smartphone will go from 100% charged to dead during a single 5 minute ski run if I leave it in an outside pocket. I would think a smartphone battery in space in the shade would be dead pretty much immediately.
That may be true for “cold” as in “winter in Siberia” cold. But if electronics get much colder than that, electronics can break down physically. Different materials have different CTE (coefficient of thermal expansion), so some things shrink more than others, and connection between them break. And some materials get brittle at low temperatures.
This is why hardware used in space (including satellites) usually have survival heaters that kick in when the temperature gets too low. Although there’s a notable example of a satellite that lost power for several months, but most of it survived and was successfully recovered.
Aki Hoshide - he is Japanese, though he did spend part of his childhood in New Jersey (age 3-7). He works for JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), not NASA.
Vacuum is just about the best thermal insulator there is, though. Put your cell phone in a small Thermos bottle and then dip in liquid helium. It will last quite some time. If it’s actively doing something, it may actually overheat.
