SPACE/COSMOS
The european project ‘ZEUS’ seeks to collect in-space solar energy in an efficient, long-lasting way
It has been granted almost €4 million for the development of a new photovoltaic technology over the next 4 years
University of Malaga
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Specifically, ‘ZEUS’ will focus on advancing the development of nanowire solar cells, a highly innovative, radiation-resistant photovoltaic technology capable of absorbing solar energy in space, where the environment is highly aggressive.
view moreCredit: University of Malaga
The University of Malaga, through the Materials and Surfaces Laboratory, participates in an international consortium that has received one of the eight grants ‘Horizon EIC Pathfinder Challenges - In-space solar energy harvesting for innovative space applications’ that have been awarded this year at European level, with the aim of achieving significant advances in the fields of in-space solar energy collection and transmission and the new concepts of propulsion that will be used by the energy obtained.
Coordinated by the University of Lund (Sweden), the ‘ZEUS’ -Zero-loss energy harvesting using nanowire solar cells in space- project has been granted almost €4 million (€3,998,622.50) for its development over the next four years. The other participants that, together with the UMA, make up this project are the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE (Germany), the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the Technological Institute of Packaging, Transport and Logistics.
An innovative, radiation-resistant photovoltaic technology
Specifically, ‘ZEUS’ will focus on advancing the development of nanowire solar cells, a highly innovative, radiation-resistant photovoltaic technology capable of absorbing solar energy in space, where the environment is highly aggressive.
Nanowires are needle-shaped structures with a diameter of 200 nanometers –that is, a thousand times thinner than human hair–, explains Enrique Barrigón, Professor of the Department of Applied Physics I, the researcher who will lead this project at the UMA. Their nanometric scale and careful geometric distribution make them behave as “hollow” devices from the point of view of radiation damage, which significantly increases their resistance to radiation, while effectively collecting nearly one hundred percent of the possible incoming light, due to the improved optical absorption that occurs in these cells.
“Covering approximately 10 percent of a surface with active material is all that is needed to absorb as much light as a thin layer covering the entire surface of the same material would do,” says the UMA researcher.
Greater efficiency
In this respect, Enrique Barrigón explains that while current space-tested nanowire solar cells offer around 15% efficiency, ZEUS aims to significantly enhance this efficiency by employing triple junction nanowire cells with a carefully selected set of III-V semiconductor materials, potentially reaching 47% theoretical efficiency.
Likewise, this project will investigate the transfer of these solar cells onto lightweight, flexible substrates, which would enable the creation of large deployable photovoltaic panels.
Environmental sustainability
Additionally, the project underscores its commitment to sustainability by focusing on two key aspects: decarbonization and the efficient use of critical raw materials. “ZEUS aims to demonstrate not only the commercial potential of the technology, but also the environmental benefits by means of a life cycle assessment of nanowire solar cells, particularly for space energy generation”, says Professor Enrique Barrigón. Thus, increasing the electrical power of communications satellites is one of its possible applications, among others.
The main tasks of the University of Malaga in this international research will be the advanced characterization of these solar cells and the execution of the necessary tests to evaluate their resistance in the space environment.
The other participants that, together with the UMA, make up this project are the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE (Germany), the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the Technological Institute of Packaging, Transport and Logistics.
Enrique Barrigón, Professor of the Department of Applied Physics I, the researcher who will lead this project at the UMA
Revolutionary technology
The Horizon EIC Pathfinder Challenges program awards grants to projects that explore new technological areas, especially ‘deep-tech’ –based on a scientific discovery or a significant engineering innovation– which may become radically innovative technologies in the future, capable of creating new market opportunities. The overall goal is to feed the innovation market with revolutionary technologies and get them to the proof-of-concept stage.
So far, within the current Horizon Europe framework, the University of Malaga has another project of this same program. This is ‘BioRobot-MiniHeart’, whose principal researcher is Juan Antonio Guadix, from the Department of Animal Biology. In the previous H2020 program, another proposal from the UMA was also recognized: ‘SONICOM’ -Transforming auditory-based social interaction and communication in AR/VR-, by Professor Arcadio Reyes, Department of Electronic Technology.
NASA’s Hubble, New Horizons team up for a simultaneous look at Uranus
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (left) and NASA's New Horizon's spacecraft (right) image the planet Uranus.
view moreCredit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Samantha Hasler (MIT), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), New Horizons Planetary Science Theme Team; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different viewpoints. The results inform future plans to study like types of planets around other stars.
Astronomers used Uranus as a proxy for similar planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, comparing high-resolution images from Hubble to the more-distant view from New Horizons. This combined perspective will help scientists learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars with future telescopes.
"While we expected Uranus to appear differently in each filter of the observations, we found that Uranus was actually dimmer than predicted in the New Horizons data taken from a different viewpoint," said lead author Samantha Hasler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and New Horizons science team collaborator.
Direct imaging of exoplanets is a key technique for learning about their potential habitability, and offers new clues to the origin and formation of our own solar system. Astronomers use both direct imaging and spectroscopy to collect light from the observed planet and compare its brightness at different wavelengths. However, imaging exoplanets is a notoriously difficult process because they're so far away. Their images are mere pinpoints and so are not as detailed as the close-up views that we have of worlds orbiting our Sun. Researchers can also only directly image exoplanets at "partial phases," when only a portion of the planet is illuminated by their star as seen from Earth.
Uranus was an ideal target as a test for understanding future distant observations of exoplanets by other telescopes for a few reasons. First, many known exoplanets are also gas giants similar in nature. Also, at the time of the observations, New Horizons was on the far side of Uranus, 6.5 billion miles away, allowing its twilight crescent to be studied—something that cannot be done from Earth. At that distance, the New Horizons view of the planet was just several pixels in its color camera, called the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera.
On the other hand, Hubble, with its high resolution, and in its low-Earth orbit 1.7 billion miles away from Uranus, was able to see atmospheric features such as clouds and storms on the day side of the gaseous world.
"Uranus appears as just a small dot on the New Horizons observations, similar to the dots seen of directly-imaged exoplanets from observatories like Webb or ground-based observatories," added Hasler. "Hubble provides context for what the atmosphere is doing when it was observed with New Horizons."
The gas giant planets in our solar system have dynamic and variable atmospheres with changing cloud cover. How common is this among exoplanets? By knowing the details of what the clouds on Uranus looked like from Hubble, researchers are able to verify what is interpreted from the New Horizons data. In the case of Uranus, both Hubble and New Horizons saw that the brightness did not vary as the planet rotated, which indicates that the cloud features were not changing with the planet’s rotation.
However, the importance of the detection by New Horizons has to do with how the planet reflects light at a different phase than what Hubble, or other observatories on or near Earth, can see. New Horizons showed that exoplanets may be dimmer than predicted at partial and high phase angles, and that the atmosphere reflects light differently at partial phase.
NASA has two major upcoming observatories in the works to advance studies of exoplanet atmospheres and potential habitability.
“These landmark New Horizons studies of Uranus from a vantage point unobservable by any other means add to the mission’s treasure trove of new scientific knowledge, and have, like many other datasets obtained in the mission, yielded surprising new insights into the worlds of our solar system,” added New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.
NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch by 2027, will use a coronagraph to block out a star’s light to directly see gas giant exoplanets. NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, in an early planning phase, will be the first telescope designed specifically to search for atmospheric biosignatures on Earth-sized, rocky planets orbiting other stars.
“Studying how known benchmarks like Uranus appear in distant imaging can help us have more robust expectations when preparing for these future missions,” concluded Hasler. “And that will be critical to our success.”
Launched in January 2006, New Horizons made the historic flyby of Pluto and its moons in July 2015, before giving humankind its first close-up look at one of these planetary building block and Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in January 2019. New Horizons is now in its second extended mission, studying distant Kuiper Belt objects, characterizing the outer heliosphere of the Sun, and making important astrophysical observations from its unmatched vantage point in distant regions of the solar system.
The Uranus results are being presented this week at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences, in Boise, Idaho.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Alan Stern and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA's New Frontiers program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Method of Research
Observational study
Lightning strikes kick off a game of electron pinball in space
University of Colorado at Boulder
When lightning strikes, the electrons come pouring down.
In a new study, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder led by an undergraduate student have discovered a new link between weather on Earth and weather in space. The group used satellite data to show that lightning storms on our planet can knock especially high-energy, or “extra-hot,” electrons out of the inner radiation belt—a region of space filled with charged particles that surrounds Earth like an inner tube.
The team’s results could help satellites and even astronauts avoid dangerous radiation in space. This is one kind of downpour you don’t want to get caught in, said lead author and undergraduate Max Feinland.
“These particles are the scary ones or what some people call ‘killer electrons,’” said Feinland, who received his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering sciences at CU Boulder in spring 2024. “They can penetrate metal on satellites, hit circuit boards and can be carcinogenic if they hit a person in space.”
The study appeared Oct.8 in the journal Nature Communications.
The findings cast an eye toward the radiation belts, which are generated by Earth’s magnetic field. Lauren Blum, a co-author of the paper and assistant professor in the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder, explained that two of these regions encircle our planet: While they move a lot over time, the inner belt tends to begin more than 600 miles above the surface. The outer belt starts roughly around 12,000 miles from Earth. These pool floaties in space trap charged particles streaming toward our planet from the sun, forming a sort of barrier between Earth’s atmosphere and the rest of the solar system.
But they’re not exactly airtight. Scientists, for example, have long known that high-energy electrons can fall toward Earth from the outer radiation belt. Blum and her colleagues, however, are the first to spot a similar rain coming from the inner belt.
Earth and space, in other words, may not be as separate as they look.
“Space weather is really driven both from above and below,” Blum said.
Bolt from the blue
It’s a testament to the power of lightning.
When a lightning bolt flashes in the sky on Earth, that burst of energy may also send radio waves spiraling deep into space. If those waves smack into electrons in the radiation belts, they can jostle them free—a bit like shaking your umbrella to knock the water off. In some cases, such “lightning-induced electron precipitation” can even influence the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere.
To date, researchers had only collected direct measurements of lower energy, or “colder,” electrons falling from the inner radiation belt.
“Typically, the inner belt is thought to be kind of boring,” Blum said. “It’s stable. It’s always there.”
Her team’s new discovery came about almost by accident. Feinland was analyzing data from NASA’s now-decommissioned Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer (SAMPEX) satellite when he saw something odd: clumps of what seemed to be high-energy electrons moving through the inner belt.
“I showed Lauren some of my events, and she said, ‘That’s not where these are supposed to be,’” Feinland said. “Some literature suggests that there aren’t any high-energy electrons in the inner belt at all.”
The team decided to dig deeper.
In all, Feinland counted 45 surges of high-energy electrons in the inner belt from 1996 to 2006. He compared those events to records of lightning strikes in North America. Sure enough, some of the spikes in electrons seemed to happen less than a second after lightning strikes on the ground.
Electron pinball
Here’s what the team thinks is happening: Following a lightning strike, radio waves from Earth kick off a kind of manic pinball game in space. They knock into electrons in the inner belt, which then begin to bounce between Earth’s northern and southern hemispheres—going back and forth in just 0.2 seconds.
And each time the electrons bounce, some of them fall out of the belt and into our atmosphere.
“You have a big blob of electrons that bounces, and then returns and bounces again,” Blum said. “You’ll see this initial signal, and it will decay away.”
Blum isn’t sure how often such events happen. They may occur mostly during periods of high solar activity when the sun spits out a lot of high-energy electrons, stocking the inner belt with these particles.
The researchers want to understand these events better so that they can predict when they may be likely to occur, potentially helping to keep people and electronics in orbit safe.
Feinland, for his part, is grateful for the chance to study these magnificent storms.
“I didn't even realize how much I liked research until I got to do this project,” he said.
Other co-authors of the new study included Robert Marshall, associate professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU Boulder, Longzhi Gan of Boston University, Mykhaylo Shumko of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Mark Looper of The Aerospace Corporation.
Journal
Nature Communications
Article Title
Lightning-induced relativistic electron precipitation from the inner radiation belt
Article Publication Date
8-Oct-2024
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