Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
Talking about the next phase, Pelligrino said, “Most spacecraft today have solar arrays—photovoltaic cells bonded to a carrier structure—but not with this type of material and not folded to the dimensions we’ve achieved. By using novel folding techniques, inspired by origami, we are able to significantly reduce the dimensions of a giant spacecraft for launch. The packaging is so tight as to be essentially free of any voids.”
Hajimiri added that, “Wireless power transfer of this nature has not been demonstrated in space. We are also demonstrating it with our flexible, lightweight material, not necessarily a rigid structure. That adds complexity.”
Considering the impact of widespread beamed solar power on society, Hajimiri said, “It is going to revolutionize the nature of energy and access to it so that it becomes ubiquitous, it becomes dispatchable energy. You can send it where you need it. This redirection of energy is done without any mechanical movements, purely through electrical means using a focusing array, which makes it extremely fast.”
Atwater responded, “I think one can say that the Brens’ vision really was to do something that, as Ali mentioned, originally emerged almost from science fiction, to do something that would become a large-scale energy source for the world.”
Pelligrino added, “We have had JPL collaborators join our team, and that collaboration has become powerful and useful to us as we start thinking about these space demonstrations. The discussion about energy that was implicitly limited to powering the earth actually extends to space exploration also. We’re opening new chapters in the way JPL is thinking about future missions.
When questioned about the experience of working together on a long-term interdisciplinary project, Hajimiri said, “The students, the postdocs, all of us have been working very closely, and we’ve been learning a great deal about each other’s domains. This results in something that’s more than the sum of its parts, both in terms of the end result of the project as well as in terms of the training the students are getting. That training is incredibly important to the future of space technology, whether it’s for wireless power transfer, communications, space structures, or all sorts of other applications we haven’t even thought about yet.”
Atwater responded that “I had a former lifetime working in photovoltaics but never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would get involved in space until this opportunity came together. And for me, it’s been a window on a completely new world of science. That’s been tremendously exciting.
Pelligrino added, “Sometimes it feels like we are pushing our colleagues to do something that they clearly think is impossible but later turns out not to be impossible. That is just a wonderful feeling. It’s a different kind of research, where you are doing the best you can in your own field, but you are also leveraging the interface with other fields, a collective system that really is going to benefit society. Benefiting society is a much more elaborate thing than doing good work in your own area. It’s so much more challenging.”