American scientists managed to transfer solar energy from space to Earth for the first time in history. Panels installed outside of our orbit picked up the power sent out by our massive star and sent it wirelessly towards our surface.
It is an idea that had already been theorized by the legendary electrical engineer Nikola Tesla.before the decade in the first decades of the last century.
According to a review on the portal meteored, the project carried out by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech for its acronym in English) was executed successfully recently. The researchers sent towers with solar panels into space and began to collect solar energy, to avoid the difficulties that this method is subjected to on Earth.
In this environment, a probe with solar panels receives power from the massive star 365 days a year without interruption. The problem to solve was the transmission of what they had collected to Earth.
To do this, Caltech tested the Space Solar Power Project (SSPP) to collect and the MAPLE (Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment) to send.
This latter mechanism works by using an array of microwave transmitters that are lightweight and flexible. Powered by custom electronic chips built with low-cost silicon technologies, they manage to make a connection to a receiver on Earth.
The experts behind this project, which worked in its first tests, say that they “potentially (can) produce eight times more energy than solar panels anywhere on the Earth’s surface.”
Solar energy is one of the initiatives that should have the greatest strength, since it is a renewable resource (which provides unlimited electricity) and contributes to the reduction of global warming.
Tesla idea
One of the fathers of electric power, Nikola Tesla, was the main promoter of this idea. The American scientist had a vision of transmitting energy wirelessly over long distances.
The main theory proposed by Tesla was to use a network of towers and satellites in space to capture solar energy and then transmit it to Earth. He envisioned that solar energy could be captured by special receivers on these devices and converted into electricity, which would then be transmitted via electromagnetic waves or electrical currents through the air or ground to receiving devices on Earth.
Tesla also raised the idea of using the ionosphere (a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere) as a medium for the transmission of energy. He proposed the possibility of using resonant electromagnetic oscillations between the Earth and the ionosphere to efficiently transfer energy without wires.