[AR] Re: space based solar
- From: Norman Yarvin <yarvin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 18:40:42 -0400
On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 01:26:08PM -0400, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Tue, 19 Mar 2019, Keith Henson wrote:
And separate radiators might disappear altogether with a "sandwich"
structure, in which the solar array and the transmitter array are one
and the same.
This gets tricky...
Yes, the big fly in the ointment for sandwich designs is that the solar
array and the transmitter array typically want to point in different
directions, and the sandwich design makes it impossible to put a rotating
joint between the two.
The pointing direction is much less important for the microwave output
than for the solar input, though, at least if you're steering the
microwaves via phased-array. It's routine in radios to have a very
directional beam produced by an antenna that has a number of radiating
elements straight in line with the direction the beam is to travel,
the Yagi antenna being a common example. I'm not sure what the
downsides are, numerically, for emitting edge-on from a planar array
of microwave transmitters, but they couldn't be anywhere near as bad
as having your solar panel edge-on to the sun.
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