Producer of solar panels with eye-popping conversion efficiency, US-based Emcore has announced it has been awarded a contract to supply solar modules for NASA Ames’ Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission.
A total of 32 solar panels will be built for LADEE at Emcore’s manufacturing facilities located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. While a few dozen panels may not sound particularly impressive given terrestrial solar farm projects sometimes require hundreds of thousands of modules, these aren’t your average solar module.
Solar panels used in space face extremely hostile conditions. They must operate efficiently in temperatures not experienced here on Earth and survive radiation bombardment. Warranties mean little when a service call is impossible, so hardware failure is simply not an option in space projects that often run into hundreds of millions of dollars.
Emcore says the modules used for this project will have beginning-of-life (BOL) conversion efficiency nearing 30%; which is far higher than any non-concentrating panel available on the home solar power market.
The LADEE mission will study the lunar atmosphere, including fine dust particles suspended above the lunar surface. The mission is currently scheduled to be launched in early 2013 aboard a Minotaur V vehicle.
Earlier this year, Emcore was awarded a contract to supply solar panels to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre for its 2014 Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS).
In July, a pair of Emcore Inverted Metamorphic Module Quadruple-Junction (IMM4J) solar cells were released into low-earth orbit during the Space Shuttle Atlantis’ final mission. The company says the Emcore IMM4J large-area solar cells were among the highest efficiency solar cells ever launched into space, demonstrating a laboratory world record conversion efficiency of greater than 36% as measured under simulated space solar illumination conditions.
According to Emcore, over 1,000,000 of its solar cells are powering more than 90 satellites today.
