Some crazy ideas end up becoming possible long-term solutions
This is neither an eccentric scientist that the world of cinema has already shown us, nor a crazy YouTube inventor. Ali Hajimiri He is a professor at California Institute of Technology and could have the clue for use the maximum energy of the Sun From space. How is this possible?
The energy crisis tackled from space
A recent article published on the Caltech website tells us about Ali Hajimiri's ambitious plan.
This professor intends, in short, send solar panels to spacethat these collect the energy coming from the king star and that, later, send her to Earth. Despite doubts about this technology, whether the energy beam will be harmful to birds before reaching our planet or whether it is better to use the panels on dry land, the plan makes a lot of sense.
Caltech professor and inventor Ali Hajimiri's latest and boldest project could change the way we power our lives pic.twitter.com/5o2wh3sX4f
—Bloomberg (@business) July 14, 2018
The professor shares explanations about these and other doubts, alluding to the fact that the solar panels in space they would be able to get 8 times more energy that the panels of the Earth, that the beam of light would not kill any animal since his ingenuity could not be turned into a weaponas if it were the Death Star itself from Star Wars.
Last month of January 2023for giving you background on the investigation of Ali Hajimiri, his team launched a small experiment to low Earth orbit, called MAPLE. This consists of a prototype solar panel, 30 centimeters long, which is capable of converting the sun's energy into energy for our planet.
In a first, @Caltech's Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD) wirelessly transmits power in space ?
A Momentus Vigoride spacecraft carried SSPD to orbit & we are providing ongoing hosted payload services to this ? mission!https://t.co/0L4PjHJGwM
— MOMENTUS (@momentusspace) June 1, 2023
During the first teststhey got turn on a couple of LED lights from said experiment, although they sought to go one step further: to be able to detect energy from space. Already in the month of May 2023and up on the roof of the Caltech campus, the researchers managed to detect the signal coming from MAPLE in what could be the first step in creating a large-scale energy system.
However, there are many challenges to shape this colossal projectthe first of them being immense size that solar panels should have. Mamatha Maheshwarappa, a worker at the United Kingdom Space Agency, assures that these panels should be twice as large as the Burj Khalifa, the largest building in the world with a height of 830 meters. And we haven't built anything that big on Earth yet, so he imagines the difficulty of doing so in space.
It is his own United Kingdom who already has a running project called CASSIOPeiA, which would be a satellite 1.7 kilometers in diameter and that would be capable of sending up to 2 gigawatts of power to Earth. Besides, the ESA It also has its SOLARIS project, which would also try to harness the Sun's energy from space. The future seems as bright as it is complicated, but human beings have already proven that they are capable of overcoming major challenges.