How NASA Uses and Improves Solar Power? The Sun is the most energetic object in our solar system. Humans have been finding creative ways to harness the Sun's heat and light for thousands of years. But the practice of converting the Sun’s energy into electricity — what we now call solar power — is less than 200 years old. Yet in that short time, solar power has revealed the Sun’s limitless potential to power an increasingly technological society. Since the 1950s, NASA has harnessed the energy of the Sun to power spacecraft and drive scientific discovery across our solar system. Today, NASA continues to advance solar panel technology and test new innovations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHA3DwXNhjc Video credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Lacey Young A Brief History of Solar Power: https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/standard-compressed-alexandre-edmond-becquerel-e1727186117653.jpg Pic: A portrait of French scientist Alexandre Edmond Becquerel, taken sometime in the mid-1800s. (Public Domain) Even before the light bulb, scientists had inklings of the power locked up in a ray of sunlight. In 1839, French scientist Alexandre Edmond Becquerel (who was 19 at the time) was working in his father’s laboratory, experimenting with two metal sheets placed in an electricity-conducting liquid. As he shined light on the device, he detected a weak electric current — what we now know to be a flow of electrons through the material. This phenomenon was the first demonstration that light could generate electricity, known today as the photovoltaic effect. So how Solar Panels Work? Silicon is an abundant material used in many technological applications because it is a very good “semiconductor, ” or material whose ability to carry electric current can be easily manipulated by adding energy. In typical solar cells, silicon is layered in three thin sheets. A middle layer is made of pure silicon. The outer two silicon layers are injected with other elements (typically phosphorous on one side, and boron on the other) that differ in their capacity to “donate” or “accept” electrons. As light strikes the pure silicon layer, it energizes the silicon’s electrons, which then begin to move within the material. Those electrons are attracted to the silicon layer designed to “accept” electrons, leading to a buildup of negative and positive charges in the outer layers. These two sides are then connected with wires to form a circuit that facilitates the flow of electrons from one side to the other, generating usable power. Silicon-based solar cells power many of NASA’s spacecraft, including the James Webb Space Telescope. Learn more about why this abundant material is used in solar panels in this excerpt from NASA’s Elements of Webb video series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq3jgT5fjhg Silicon is the go-to chip and sensor material for a reason: It works! Learn about the semiconductor properties that make this element the right choice for the Webb Telescope. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center A breakthrough came in 1954. https://assets.science.nasa.gov/dynamicimage/assets/science/esd/climate/2023/12/2-405051main_solarfarmpanels-1.jpg That's when scientists at Bell Labs used an abundant material called silicon to create the first solar cell that achieved 6% efficiency. Solar panels today use this same basic design, with adjustments that have allowed industrial and commercial solar panels to achieve between 15% and 23% efficiency.