Fig. 7. Artist's concept of a 10 MW solar array SPS constructed in a low Earth orbit and then boosted up to a geosynchronous orbit. conditions will be tested as the SPS will take many different paths over the receiving station. The rest of the mission time will be devoted to operation of the MPD arcjet thruster to boost the SPS to a higher orbit, so that environmental modification of the magnetosphere due to the electrical propulsion exhaust will be monitored. When it reaches a geosynchronous orbit, additional construction work will be initiated to make the antenna larger to get a narrower beam to conduct power transmission tests from the geosynchronous orbit. An experiment will be performed to fabricate additional solar cells by means of the “Molecular Beam Grapho-Epitaxy” method which will produce a very large area of solar cell under high vacuum environment (10). The produced cells will be electrically assembled into the first power unit to augment the total output power. During the last and longest phase, the microwave power shall be targeted to a specific Earth point to demonstrate long duration effect of microwave on the atmosphere. Laser Option (7) Laser SPS systems with same order of power level have been studied. In this case, the solar array can be eliminated by means of a solar pumped laser, which makes a completely different system from the previous model. The study result suggests that the weight of this system is heavier than the microwave system, because the laser conversion efficiency is low at present.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==