Group items tagged

"V3Solar has developed a cone-shaped solar energy harvester that is claimed to generate over 20 times more electricity than a flat panel thanks to a combination of concentrating lenses, dynamic spin, conical shape, and advanced electronics."

Hmm.. that seems counter intuitive... how would it ever be that much better than a flat panel? Rotating the PV will only make sure only parts are illuminated. Operating temperature is a better argument, but that comes at the cost of exposure. Came across this little gem of a webpage, maybe we should outsource our impossibility EM drive work next time? :) https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-v3solars-spinning-solar-panel-cone-spin-cell-coolspin.t1166/

very nice!! could not find the dimensions yet ...

20m diagonal http://www.jspec.jaxa.jp/e/activity/ikaros.html http://www.jspec.jaxa.jp/e/activity/images/ikaros/pic_07_l.jpg

that is honestly a little bit less impressive than I had hoped for ... this "just" 200 m2 ... our Furoshiki net had already 130m2 and we deployed it within 1 min under much worse conditions ...

google translate helps ;)

We had some discussion about the Lotus-effect roughly two years ago. Zoe said that NASA surely worked on it. Well, she was right.

Nice... Now I have a lame question: after you have discovered ~500k asteroids, all moving (I assume more or less) chaotically in that asteroid belt, how do you tell one from another?

That's what I thought but when presented as a green "goo" in the video, it appears rather unordered... so I guess this is just an impression evoked by a not-to-scale presentation?

It depends... orbits can be chaotic if the orbital period is in a resonance with Jupiter, although such orbits are not stable. Such configurations tend to get disrupted pretty quickly (in cosmic terms :P) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkwood_gap

remember my proposal on citizen scientists .... :-)

Interesting launch, not just the first Japanese Venus [0] mission, also an interplanetary university mission [1] and also a solar sail mission [2]. Looks very interesting ... [0] http://www.jaxa.jp/countdown/f17/index_e.html [1] http://www.unisec.jp/unitec-1/en/about_unitec-1.html [2] http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/ikaros/index_e.html

from Ian

very nice .... looks really promising!

"solar cavity-receiver reactor" .... nice!!! I'm going to build one!

breakthroughs vs. accelerated deployment in climate change mitigation technologies.

indeed. puts me in mind of the often reinvented private ACT idea. actually there's a bunch of interesting looking articles on his website. http://www.khoslaventures.com/khosla/papers.html . No sps in the solar one as far as i can tell :) found this bit intriguing too in that, albeit presumably out of context, it doesn't make sense ""The solution to our energy problems is almost the exact opposite of what Khosla says," declares Joseph Romm, who is the editor of Climate Progress, an influential climate blog, and a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a think-tank. "Technology breakthroughs are unlikely to be the answer. Accelerated deployment of existing technologies will get you down the cost curve much more rapidly than a breakthrough."" found this seemingly not very well considered piece (to be fair a blog post) by the guy http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/02/is-anyone-more-incoherent-than-vinod-khosla/ . maybe he's written some more convincing stuff in this vein somewhere.

"Mr Khosla (...) is investing over $1 billion of his clients' money in black swans" Well, with his own money his approach might be a little different :-)

was always a bit sceptic about the molten salt technology but practise seems to show that it works just fine ...