> you put the radiators and the rest of the satellite within the shade of the solar panels, you can still make the area arbitrarily large
The larger you make the area, the more solar energy you are collecting. More shade = more heat to radiate. You are not actually making the problem easier.
no the radiator planes are in the shade, so you can increase the height of a pyramidal shaped satellite for a constant solar panel base, and thus enjoy arbitrarily low rest temperatures, check my calculation which I added.
for a target temperature of 300K that would mean the pyramid height would be a bit less than 3 times higher than the square base side length h=3L.
I even handicapped my example by only counting heat radiation from 2 of the 4 panels, assuming the 2 others are simply reflective (to make the calculation of a nearby warm Earth irrelevant).
> you put the radiators and the rest of the satellite within the shade of the solar panels, you can still make the area arbitrarily large
The larger you make the area, the more solar energy you are collecting. More shade = more heat to radiate. You are not actually making the problem easier.
no the radiator planes are in the shade, so you can increase the height of a pyramidal shaped satellite for a constant solar panel base, and thus enjoy arbitrarily low rest temperatures, check my calculation which I added.
for a target temperature of 300K that would mean the pyramid height would be a bit less than 3 times higher than the square base side length h=3L.
I even handicapped my example by only counting heat radiation from 2 of the 4 panels, assuming the 2 others are simply reflective (to make the calculation of a nearby warm Earth irrelevant).