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- cross-posted to:
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China Installed More Solar Panels Last Year Than the U.S. Has in Total::China installed more new solar capacity last year than the total amount ever installed in any other country.
Until it’s a new moon…
Actually that raises an interesting point…the best time for solar, on earth, is when the panels are most directly hit.
So since the moon is tidally locked to the earth, that means that there would be better ideal tilts at each longitude, so that whenever the sun is out, they are tilted to receive as much light as possible. But that also means that the panels only even receive light for half of the lunar cycle, at most.
Right? Am I overthinking this?
There are craters towards the poles that receive sunlight all the time. But you’d still have to build extra panels for the lunar cycle. Equatorial stations might be better, and if you built 3, 2 would be in direct sunlight almost all the time.
Which is fine! Gives you time to do maintenance without any additional losses.
Not really…you don’t want to be out doing maintenance at lunar night. We’d have to have some serious improvement in EVA suits, mechsuits, or robots.
There’s a reason every Apollo mission landed at lunar dawn.
That’s it. We’ll need to invent sun lamps. Lamps bright and hot enough to illuminate and warm the Martian surface at night, to enable maintenance.