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Solar Panels On Spacecraft
Spacecraft operating in the inner Solar System usually rely on the use of power electronics-managed photovoltaic solar panels to derive electricity from sunlight. Outside the orbit of Jupiter, solar radiation is too weak to produce sufficient power within current solar technology and spacecraft mass limitations, so radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) are instead used as a power source.NASA JPL Publication: Basics of Space Flight, Chapter 11. Typical Onboard Systems, Electrical Power Supply and Distribution Subsystems, History The first practical silicon-based solar cells were introduced by Bell Labs in April 1954. They were initially about 6% efficient, but improvements began to raise this number almost immediately. Bell had been interested in the idea as a system to provide power at remote telephone repeater stations, but the cost of the devices was far too high to be practical in this role. Aside from small experimental kits and uses, the cells remained largely unus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Earth Horizon And International Space Station Solar Panel Array (Expedition 17 Crew, August 2008)
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surface is made up of the ocean, dwarfing Earth's polar ice, lakes, and rivers. The remaining 29% of Earth's surface is land, consisting of continents and islands. Earth's surface layer is formed of several slowly moving tectonic plates, which interact to produce mountain ranges, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Earth's liquid outer core generates the magnetic field that shapes the magnetosphere of the Earth, deflecting destructive solar winds. The atmosphere of the Earth consists mostly of nitrogen and oxygen. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere like carbon dioxide (CO2) trap a part of the energy from the Sun close to the surface. Water vapor is widely present in the atmosphere and forms clouds that cover most of the planet. More solar energy is r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ionizing Radiation
Ionizing radiation (or ionising radiation), including nuclear radiation, consists of subatomic particles or electromagnetic waves that have sufficient energy to ionize atoms or molecules by detaching electrons from them. Some particles can travel up to 99% of the speed of light, and the electromagnetic waves are on the high-energy portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma rays, X-rays, and the higher energy ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum are ionizing radiation, whereas the lower energy ultraviolet, visible light, nearly all types of laser light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves are non-ionizing radiation. The boundary between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation in the ultraviolet area is not sharply defined, as different molecules and atoms ionize at different energies. The energy of ionizing radiation starts between 10 electronvolts (eV) and 33 eV. Typical ionizing subatomic particles include alpha particles, beta particles, and neutrons. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Illumination Test On One Of Juno's Solar Panels
Illumination may refer to: Science and technology * Illumination, an observable property and effect of light * Illumination (lighting), the use of light sources * Global illumination, algorithms used in 3D computer graphics Spirituality and religion * Divine illumination, the process of human thought needs to be aided by divine grace * Illuminationism, c.q. Illuminationist philosophy, a doctrine according to which the process of human thought needs to be aided by divine grace * Divine light, an aspect of divine presence Arts and media * Illumination (image), the use of light and shadow in art * Illuminated manuscript An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document where the text is often supplemented with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations. Often used in the Roman Catholic Church for prayers, liturgical services and psalms, th ..., the artistic decoration of hand-written texts * ''The Damnation of Theron Ware'', a 1896 novel by Harold Frederic, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Night Glider Mode
Night Glider mode (or "XVV Night Glider mode") is one of the procedures for orienting the solar arrays on the International Space Station. Normally the photovoltaic solar arrays of the space station track the sun. However, one of the main causes of orbital decay on the space station is that the area of the solar arrays, brushing against the thin residual atmosphere at orbital altitude, results in a small amount of aerodynamic drag. The drag can be lowered by orienting the solar arrays in "sun slicer" mode, where they fly edge-on to the orbital direction, rather than tracking the sun, however, this orientation reduces the power produced. The "night glider" mode is a hybrid orientation,G. Landis and C-Y Lu, "Solar Array Orientation Options for a Space Station in Low Earth Orbit", ''Journal of Propulsion and Power, Vol. 7'' No. 1, 123-125 (1991). where the solar arrays track the sun during the period when the space station is illuminated, are rotated edge-on to the orbital directi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Venus Express
''Venus Express'' (VEX) was the first Venus exploration mission of the European Space Agency (ESA). Launched in November 2005, it arrived at Venus in April 2006 and began continuously sending back science data from its polar orbit around Venus. Equipped with seven scientific instruments, the main objective of the mission was the long term observation of the Venusian atmosphere. The observation over such long periods of time had never been done in previous missions to Venus, and was key to a better understanding of the atmospheric dynamics. ESA concluded the mission in December 2014. History The mission was proposed in 2001 to reuse the design of the '' Mars Express'' mission. However, some mission characteristics led to design changes: primarily in the areas of thermal control, communications and electrical power. For example, since Mars is approximately twice as far from the Sun as Venus, the radiant heating of the spacecraft is four times greater for ''Venus Express'' than ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tracking And Data Relay Satellite System
The U.S. Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) is a network of American communications satellites (each called a tracking and data relay satellite, TDRS) and ground stations used by NASA for space communications. The system was designed to replace an existing network of ground stations that had supported all of NASA's crewed flight missions. The prime design goal was to increase the time spacecraft were in communication with the ground and improve the amount of data that could be transferred. Many Tracking and Data Relay Satellites were launched in the 1980s and 1990s with the Space Shuttle and made use of the Inertial Upper Stage, a two-stage solid rocket booster developed for the shuttle. Other TDRS were launched by Atlas IIa and Atlas V rockets. The most recent generation of satellites provides ground reception rates of 6 Mbit/s in the S-band and 800 Mbit/s in the Ku- and Ka-bands. This is mainly used by the United States military. Origins To satisfy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
View Factor
In radiative heat transfer, a view factor, F_, is the proportion of the radiation which leaves surface A that strikes surface B. In a complex 'scene' there can be any number of different objects, which can be divided in turn into even more surfaces and surface segments. View factors are also sometimes known as configuration factors, form factors, angle factors or shape factors. Summation of view factors Because radiation leaving a surface is conserved, the sum of all view factors ''from'' a given surface, S_i, is unity: :\sum_^n = 1 For example, consider a case where two blobs with surfaces ''A'' and ''B'' are floating around in a cavity with surface ''C''. All of the radiation that leaves ''A'' must either hit ''B'' or ''C'', or if ''A'' is concave, it could hit ''A''. 100% of the radiation leaving ''A'' is divided up among ''A'', ''B'', and ''C''. Confusion often arises when considering the radiation that ''arrives'' at a ''target'' surface. In that case, it generally does ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Waste Heat
Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work. All such processes give off some waste heat as a fundamental result of the laws of thermodynamics. Waste heat has lower utility (or in thermodynamics lexicon a lower exergy or higher entropy) than the original energy source. Sources of waste heat include all manner of human activities, natural systems, and all organisms, for example, incandescent light bulbs get hot, a refrigerator warms the room air, a building gets hot during peak hours, an internal combustion engine generates high-temperature exhaust gases, and electronic components get warm when in operation. Instead of being "wasted" by release into the ambient environment, sometimes waste heat (or cold) can be used by another process (such as using hot engine coolant to heat a vehicle), or a portion of heat that would otherwise be wasted can be reused in the same process if make-up heat is added to the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sphere Packing
In geometry, a sphere packing is an arrangement of non-overlapping spheres within a containing space. The spheres considered are usually all of identical size, and the space is usually three-dimensional Euclidean space. However, sphere packing problems can be generalised to consider unequal spheres, spaces of other dimensions (where the problem becomes circle packing in two dimensions, or hypersphere packing in higher dimensions) or to non-Euclidean spaces such as hyperbolic space. A typical sphere packing problem is to find an arrangement in which the spheres fill as much of the space as possible. The proportion of space filled by the spheres is called the ''packing density'' of the arrangement. As the local density of a packing in an infinite space can vary depending on the volume over which it is measured, the problem is usually to maximise the average or asymptotic density, measured over a large enough volume. For equal spheres in three dimensions, the densest packing uses ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Solar Wafer
In electronics, a wafer (also called a slice or substrate) is a thin slice of semiconductor, such as a crystalline silicon (c-Si), used for the fabrication of integrated circuits and, in photovoltaics, to manufacture solar cells. The wafer serves as the substrate for microelectronic devices built in and upon the wafer. It undergoes many microfabrication processes, such as doping, ion implantation, etching, thin-film deposition of various materials, and photolithographic patterning. Finally, the individual microcircuits are separated by wafer dicing and packaged as an integrated circuit. History In the semiconductor or silicon wafer industry, the term wafer appeared in the 1950s to describe a thin round slice of semiconductor material, typically germanium or silicon. Round shape comes from single-crystal ingots usually produced using the Czochralski method. Silicon wafers were first introduced in the 1940s. By 1960, silicon wafers were being manufactured in the U.S. b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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