ISS Goes Solar

SumDog writes "The international space station's newest power source, a set of solar wings, made its debut yesterday. The solar array is part of a new 17.5-ton space station segment that was connected to the orbiting outpost during a spacewalk Monday."

Re:Wait...

[rednip]

So the one place where greenhouse gas emissions don't matter uses renewable energy?

If you think that the price of gas is expensive at the boat dock, you should see the bill for delivering a tankful 200 miles in the sky.

Re:Nuclear power and spacecraft

[Jugalator]

I wonder if this image will catch the tree huggers' attention ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:RTG_radiation_m easurement.jpg [wikipedia.org]

Re:Well

[ari_j]

That's just it ... "goes solar" implies that this is the first set of solar panels on the station, which is patently false. Nothing in the blurb corrects the misstatement, either. That's annoying.

Re:Wait...

[Original Replica]

Sure, but his comment is about green house gas emissions, not the price($) of anything.

The main reason to not want to emit greenhouse gases is the "cost" of global warming. You will notice that people who view that cost as very high: already use solar panels and live "off the grid", and people who think that cost is a joke: drive Hummers with the A/C on and the windows down. NASA, like everyone else, is going with the lowest percieved cost.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of power isn't an issue, since they'd just use more RTGs. The main problem is that it's in LEO and will eventually fall back to earth. Nobody would go for plutonium falling back to earth.

Re:ouch

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, you're not a physicist. The mass of the array doesn't at all influence the amount of fuel necessary to keep it in orbit. What matters is its cross sectional area.

Re:Well

[confused one]

Juno is slated to go into Jupiter orbit. Solar may be useable out to Jupiter. The panels have to increase in size proportional to the distance from the sun squared... The weight increases exponentially. To reach past Jupiter it becomes impossible (practically) to launch that much mass from the ground. If you want 1kW of power at Saturn or maybe the Kuiper belt you have to use nuclear. If Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, were powered by solar, even using these new panels, we would not still be receiving telemetry from it. Voyager 1 is currently is currently 18 times farther from the sun than Jupiter. Voyager 2 is currently 15 times farther from the sun than Jupiter. Both are studying the boundary of our solar system.

Yeah, I suspect much of the advances in solar technology have come out of NASA's budget. This is the kind of area where NASA and DOE spending feeds back obvious results.

I get frustrated as well when people protest launching nuclear powered spacecraft. The probability of an accident is extremely small. The probability of that accident affecting populated areas is smaller. The effect would be insignificant barring an explosion at the launch tower; and, that would be contained to the area around the base. If people are going to make the argument against, I wish they would do it with real numbers. If you're going to argue that "it's bad" then show me how bad and show me how that level of "bad" compares to the safety standards...

I do like this link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:RTG_radiation_m easurement.jpg [wikipedia.org]