The device could one day beam essentially endless renewable energy back to Earth via microwave transmitters.
, co-funded by defense manufacturer Northrop Grumman alongside the Bren family’s $100 million endowment, saw its first major milestone completion yesterday via the SSPD arrival above Earth.Over the next few weeks and months, the roughly 110-pound prototype will send back data on three main projects. The Deployable on-Orbit ultraLight Composite Experiment will test lightweight, foldable structures that can unfurl to collect sunlight.
estimated that a single, half-mile wide band of photovoltaics orbiting above Earth could hypothetically generate the same amount of energy as the entire planet’s remaining oil supplies over the course of just one year. To do this,explained in 2011 that high energy lasers could transmit the solar supply back to Earth at roughly 80 percent efficiency to a global network of receivers, thus providing clean power across the world, even to places with previously unreliable electricity grids.
A multitude of hurdles remain, most notably the vast costs attached to any space engineering project. Still, as Ali Hajimiri, Caltech’s Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering and co-director of SSPP,
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South Korea's moon mission snaps stunning Earth pics after successful lunar arrivalAndrew is a freelance space journalist with a focus on reporting on China's rapidly growing space sector. He began writing for Space.com in 2019 and writes for SpaceNews, IEEE Spectrum, National Geographic, Sky & Telescope, New Scientist and others. Andrew first caught the space bug when, as a youngster, he saw Voyager images of other worlds in our solar system for the first time. Away from space, Andrew enjoys trail running in the forests of Finland. You can follow him on Twitter AJ_FI.
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