BY MATT WILLIAMS AND UNIVERSE TODAY
While the technology behind solar cells has existed since the late 19th century, generating solar power in space presents some serious challenges.
Solar power, long considered the leading contender among renewable energy sources, has advanced significantly over the past few decades. The cost of manufacturing and installing solar panels has dropped considerably, and efficiency has increased, making it price competitive with coal, oil, and fossil fuels. However, some barriers, like distribution and storage, still prevent solar power from being adopted more aggressively. In addition, there’s the ever-present issue of intermittency, where arrays cannot collect power in bad weather and during evenings.
These issues have led to the concept of space-based solar power (SBSP), where satellites equipped with solar arrays could gather solar energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. To test this method, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) recently launched a technology demonstrator to space. It’s called the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD), which will test several key components of SBSP and evaluate the method’s ability to harvest clean energy and beam it back to Earth.
The SSPD launched at 9:55 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, January 3rd, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC 40) at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission (Transporter 6) was a dedicated rideshare that transported dozens of small satellites to space and deposited them in a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). The 50-kilogram (110 lbs) satellite was carried aboard a Vigoride spacecraft (provided by commercial space company Momentus) and consisted of three main experiments, each tasked with testing a different key technology…
