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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."
And you have to send the oxygen too. Its tough to make green house gases without any oxygen rich environment to burn it in.
Makes me wonder: is the ISS going to sell the extra electricity back to the grid?
Me thinks you are talking out of your rear aperature
Its damn hard to image ISS _details_ (even with the shuttle attached) with an 8inch (200mm) telescope let alone a pair of binoculars. I've seen the ISS (with and without attached shuttle) naked eye, thru binoculars (7x50), and an 8 inch Meade LX-90 using a 12mm eyepiece (many times naked eye, many times with the binoculars and a few with the scope). Binoculars (that you can hand hold) are going to show you a blob - a blob which (in my opinion) got more orange when they added the large set of panels in December of 2006 (STS116) - haven't had the opportunity to view the ISS since STS117 added yet another set. I've had brief glimpses of the ISS this spring with the 200mm / 12mm comobo (about 170x magnification) - with a __lot__ of imagination I might have seen more than a blob. You certainly can image a very low level of ISS detail with an 8 inch scope but you need zero cloud cover and perfect seeing, a very well collimated set of optics, well developed tracking experience, and a bit of luck. The ability to image details increases if you capture multiple images and post process the data - thats how most non-professional ISS images you see on the web are produced.
For anyone who finds this interesting you can visit heavens-above.com to get accurate info on when you can see the ISS (and other satellites) over your location - naked eye ISS viewing is perfectly doable however, only folks with a reasonably large aperature scope (8 inches or more for us non-professional astromomers) and excellent viewing conditions and tracking experience are going to see anything beyond a colored blob.
Hmmm ok, I'll grant you that (from what I remember from high school) the "g" part of a sattelite in orbit gets canceled out. However I think that the basic laws of motion - specifically F=ma still apply when it comes time to turn on the engine and give the station more velocity to bump it back up into a higher orbit. If m increases and the "a" that I need to increase the velocity is the same, I need more "F", which means a longer burn, which means more fuel.
I agree that mass has nothing to do with orbit decay, but is the above right? If not, why not?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'd like to know the realistic reasons why solar power isn't far more prevalent as a source of power generation, particularly on a local/household scale. Why are solar panels still so expensive?
At the risk of being called a troll, I will bite again.
The real reason is lack of government support. Large scale public projects can rarely succeed until they receive government subsidies. In other words, 300,000,000 Americans all need to pitch in so that a large project can make it. As a prior proof of this, consider hydroelectric (and irrigation system) dams in America. They were privately funded prior to USACE/Bureau of Reclamations taking over and during that period they all failed - economically speaking. Once the govt. funded them, it was a different story. Despite still experiencing economic failure, they are still around today and churning out the juicy electrons.
Argument of many people is that solar panels are "inefficient" in terms of production. Same can be said about hydroelectric dams (due to the immense construction and maintenance costs), but, we have hundreds of them in the country and they are producing lots of electricity - so that argument is questionable.
So, why did dams succeed and solar panels did not? Perhaps it's an order of operation - dams came first, solar panels are coming now. It takes awhile for ideas to permeate through to bureaucracies and it certainly took awhile for the large amount of dams to be built. So, maybe in another 20-30 years. Note that no new major dams have been built since about the 70s. Also note that President Carter had solar panels installed on the White House; however, once Reagan took over the White House (hey, that's a synecdoche) he had them taken down. Why?
For detailed information about the development of dams in the U.S., please read Richard White's "Organic Machine." It is a fascinating text that puts this idea of large development, government participation, and abstraction of electricity into context. This book will, in my opinion, truly predict the future of the solar panel.