> The rest of the satellite must be within the shade of the solar panel,

Problem is with solar panels themselves. When you get 1.3kW of energy per square meter and use 325w of that for electricity (25% efficiency) that means you have to get rid of almost 1kW of energy for each meter of your panel. You can do it radiatively with back surface of panels, but your panels might reach equilibrium at over 120°C, which means they stop actually producing energy. If you want to do it purely radiatively, you would need to increase temperature of some surface pointing away from sun to much more than 120°C and pump heat from your panels with some heatpump.

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adrian_b 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When the cost of the solar panels does not matter you can reach an efficiency close to 50% (with multi-junction solar cells) and the panels will also be able to work at higher temperatures.

Nevertheless, the problem described by you remains, the panels must dissipate an amount of heat at least equal with the amount of useful power that is generated. Therefore they cannot have other heat radiators on their backside, except those for their own heat.

	▲	DoctorOetker 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		the point is that even with 100% INefficient solar panels the pyramidal sides can be made to have an arbitrarily large area, and due to convexity of the pyramid each infinitesimal surface element of the radiating sides can emit the full hemisphere, so given any target temperature, we can design the pyramid sharp enough (same base, different height, so that heat absorbed is constant and heat emitted must equal it in steady state, then by basic thermal radiation math, the asymptotic temperature it will settle at can be made arbitrarily close to temperature of the universe, by making the pyramid sharper.)

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DoctorOetker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

no matter how inefficient the solar panels, even with 1% efficiency, you could make the pyramid sharp enough to dissipate the heat stabilizing at any arbitrary low temperature (well, must still be above the temperature of CMB)