The following is a list of the third parties we collaborate with and a link to where you can opt opt of their personalised marketing programmes that we and other advertisers are using. There are several advantages to solar energy. Although expensive, it is the cleanest source of renewable energy that has the capacity to provide more energy than the world consumes or is predicted to consume in the future.
A space-based solar power technological process includes using solar panels to collect solar energy in space with reflectors or inflatable mirrors that direct solar radiation onto solar panels, and then beaming it on Earth through a microwave or laser. The energy is then received on Earth via a microwave antenna a rectenna. According to the National Space Society , space-based solar power has the potential to dwarf all the other sources of energy combined. They argue that space-based solar power can provide large quantities of energy with very little negative environmental impact.
It can also solve our current energy and greenhouse gas emissions problems. The infographic below highlights information about space-based solar power , current related trends, and what different countries are doing in terms of research and funding. If you would like to use this infographic on your website, use the embed code below:.
Custom width:. Solar energy contributes only TWh. Current predictions indicate that the world population will reach 9. In addition, climate change impacts are accelerating.
Although we generate a big percentage of the world energy from fossil fuels, fossil fuels contribute significantly to the increase of climate change. Comparatively, solar energy is the safest source of energy today - though it still only contributes a small percentage of the global energy production.
The death rates from solar production are 1, times lower than coal , and it has one of the lowest CO2 emissions , at 5g CO2 eq per kWh. This is because, unlike Earth, the space environment does not have night and day, and the satellites are in the Earth's shadow for only a maximum of 72 minutes per night.
Space-based solar panels can generate 2, gigawatts of power constantly. This is 40 times more energy than a solar panel would generate on Earth annually. Project Hydra enabled the platforms to communicate directly via an open-system gateway that translates data between native communications links and other weapons systems.
Emerging technologies will fundamentally change the character and speed of war and will require an omnipresent communications backbone to manage capabilities across the entire battlefield. It was a promising outcome, but reconnaissance and fighter aircraft represent only a tiny fraction of the nodes in a future battle space.
Lockheed Martin has continued to build off Project Hydra, introducing additional platforms in the network architecture. Extending the distributed-gateway approach to all platforms can make the resulting network resilient to the loss of individual nodes by ensuring that critical data gets through without having to spend money to replace existing platform radios with a new, common radio.
Another series of projects with a software platform called HiveStar showed that a fully functional 5G network could be assembled using base stations about the size of a cereal box. What's more, those base stations could be installed on modestly sized multicopters and flown around a theater of operations—this network was literally "on the fly.
The HiveStar team carried out a series of trials this year culminating in a joint demonstration with the U. Army's Ground Vehicle Systems Center. The objective was to support a real-world Army need: using autonomous vehicles to deliver supplies in war zones.
The team started simply, setting up a 5G base station and establishing a connection to a smartphone. A white 3-D printed box housed processors for distributed-computing and communications software, called HiveStar. The housings were mounted on unpiloted aerial vehicles for a demonstration of a fully airborne 5G network.
The team then tested the compact system in an area without existing infrastructure, as might very well be true of a war zone or disaster area. The system passed the test: It established 5G connectivity between this roving cell tower in the sky with a tablet on the ground. Next, the team set about wirelessly connecting a group of base stations together into a flying, roving heterogeneous 5G military network that could perform useful missions.
For this they relied on Lockheed-Martin developed software called HiveStar, which manages network coverage and distributes tasks among network nodes—in this case, the multicopters cooperating to find and photograph the target.
This management is dynamic: if one node is lost to interference or damage, the remaining nodes adjust to cover the loss. For the team's first trial, they chose a pretty standard military chore: locate and photograph a target using multiple sensor systems, a function called tip and cue.
In a war zone such a mission might be carried out by a relatively large UAV outfitted with serious processing power. Here the team used the gNodeB and S-band radio setup as before, but with a slight difference. All 5G networks need a software suite called 5G core services, which is responsible for such basic functions as authenticating a user and managing the handoffs from tower to tower. In this trial, those core functions were running on a standard Dell PowerEdge R 1U rack-mounted server on the ground.
So the network consisted of the gNodeB on the lead copter, which communicated with the ground using 5G and depended on the core services on the ground computers.
The lead copter communicated using S-band radio links, with several camera copters and one search copter with a software-defined radio programmed to detect an RF pulse in the target frequency.
The team worked with the HiveStar software, which managed the network's communications and computing, via the 5G tablet. All that was needed was a target for the copters to search for. So the team outfitted a remotely controlled toy jeep, about 1 meter long, with a software-defined radio emitter as a surrogate target.
The team initiated the tip-and-cue mission by entering commands on the 5G tablet. The lead copter acted as a router to the rest of the heterogeneous 5G and S-band network.
Messages initiating the mission were then distributed to the other cooperating copters via the S-band radio connection. Once these camera platforms received the messages, their onboard HiveStar mission software cooperated to autonomously distribute tasks among the team to execute search maneuvers. The multicopters lifted off in search of the target RF emitter. Once the detecting copter located the target jeep's radio signal, the camera copters quickly sped to the area and captured images of the jeep.
Then, via the 5G gNodeB, they sent these images, along with precise latitude and longitude information, to the tablet. Mission accomplished. Next the team thought of ways to fly the entire 5G system, freeing it from any dependence on specific locations on the ground.
To do this, they had to put the 5G core services on the lead copter, the one outfitted with the gNodeB. Working with a partner company, they loaded the core services software onto a single board computer, an Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX , along with the gNodeB. For the lead copter, which would carry this gear, they chose a robust, industrial-grade quadcopter, the Freefly Alta X.
They equipped it with the Nvidia board, antennas, filters, and the S-band radios. At the Army's behest, the team came up with a plan to use the flying network to demonstrate leader-follower autonomous-vehicle mobility. It's a convoy : A human drives a lead vehicle, and up to eight autonomous vehicles follow behind, using routing information transmitted to them from the lead vehicle. Just as in the tip-and-cue demonstration, the team established a heterogeneous 5G and S-band network with the upgraded 5G payload and a series of supporting copters that formed a connected S-band mesh network.
This mesh connected the convoy to a second, identical convoy several kilometers away, which was also served by a copter-based 5G and S-band base station. After the commander initiated the mission, the Freefly Alta X flew itself above the lead vehicle at a height of about meters and connected to it via the 5G link. The HiveStar mission-controller software directed the supporting multicopters to launch, form, and maintain the mesh network. The vehicle convoy started its circuit around a test range about 10 km in circumference.
During this time, the copter connected via 5G to the lead convoy vehicle would relay position and other telemetric information to the other vehicles in the convoy, while following overhead as the convoy traveled at around 50 km per hour.
Data from the lead vehicle was shared by this relay to following vehicles as well as the second convoy via the distributed multicopter-based S-band mesh network. Current 5G standards do not include connections via satellites or aircraft. But planned revisions, designated Release 17 by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project consortium, are expected next year and will support nonterrestrial networking capabilities for 5G.
Chris Philpot. The team also challenged the system by simulating the loss of one of the data links either 5G or S-band due to jamming or malfunction. If a 5G link was severed, the system immediately switched to the S band, and vice versa, to maintain connectivity.
Such a capability would be important in a war zone, where jamming is a constant threat. Though encouraging, the Hydra and HiveStar trials were but first steps, and many high hurdles will have to be cleared before the scenario that opens this article can become reality.
Chief among these is expanding the coverage and range of the 5G-enabled networks to continental or intercontinental range, increasing their security, and managing their myriad connections. We are looking to the commercial sector to bring big ideas to these challenges. Satellite constellations, for instance, can provide a degree of global coverage, along with cloud-computing services via the internet and the opportunity for mesh networking and distributed computing.
And though today's 5G standards do not include space-based 5G access, the Release 17 standards coming in from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project consortium will natively support nonterrestrial networking capabilities for the 5G ecosystem.
So we're working with our commercial partners to integrate their 3GPP-compliant capabilities to enable direct-to-device 5G connectivity from space. Security will entail many challenges.
Cyberattackers can be counted on to attempt to exploit any vulnerabilities in the software-defined networking and network-virtualization capabilities of the 5G architecture. In , researchers at the California Institute of Technology outlined designs for a modular power station , consisting of thousands of ultralight solar cell tiles. They also demonstrated a prototype tile weighing just g per square metre, similar to the weight of card.
Recently, developments in manufacturing, such as 3D printing, are also being investigated for their potential in space power. At the University of Liverpool, we are exploring new manufacturing techniques for printing ultralight solar cells on to solar sails.
We are exploring how to embed solar cells on sail structures to create large, fuel-free power stations. These methods would enable us to construct the power stations in space. Indeed, it could one day be possible to manufacture and deploy units in space from the International Space Station or the future lunar gateway station that will orbit the Moon.
Such devices could in fact help provide power on the Moon. Solar energy is already used to power spacecraft, but beaming that energy back for use on Earth would become the next level Credit: Nasa. While we are currently reliant on materials from Earth to build power stations, scientists are also considering using resources from space for manufacturing, such as materials found on the Moon. But one of the major challenges ahead will be getting the power transmitted back to Earth.
The antenna would then convert the waves back into electricity. Researchers led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have already developed designs and demonstrated an orbiter system which should be able to do this. This makes putting solar panels into space a tempting possibility. Additionally, SBSP can be used to get reliable and clean energy to people in remote communities around the world, without relying on the traditional grid to a large local power plant.
Self-assembling satellites are launched into space, along with reflectors and a microwave or laser power transmitter. Reflectors or inflatable mirrors spread over a vast swath of space, directing solar radiation onto solar panels.
These panels convert solar power into either a microwave or a laser, and beam uninterrupted power down to Earth. On Earth, power-receiving stations collect the beam and add it to the electric grid. The two most commonly discussed designs for SBSP are a large, deeper space microwave transmitting satellite and a smaller, nearer laser transmitting satellite. Designs for microwave transmitting satellites are massive, with solar reflectors spanning up to 3 km and weighing over 80, metric tons.
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