Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: solar power

Space debris poses growing threat, but new study suggests cleanup is feasible

High up in Earth’s orbit, millions of human-made objects large and small are flying at speeds of over 15,000 miles per hour. The objects, which range from inactive satellites to fragments of equipment resulting from explosions or collisions of previously launched rockets, are space debris, colloquially referred to as space junk. Sometimes the objects collide with each other, breaking into even smaller pieces.

No matter the size, all of this debris poses a problem. Flying at high speeds caused by prior launches or explosions, they create danger for operational satellites and spacecraft, which are vital for the efficacy of modern technologies like GPS, digital communication and weather forecasting. At orbital speeds, even tiny fragments can cause significant damage to operational equipment, endangering future space missions and the people who would participate in them.

“Even if a tiny, five-millimeter object hits a solar panel or a solar array of a satellite, it could break it,” says Assistant Professor Hao Chen, whose research involves space systems design. “And we have over 100 million objects smaller than one centimeter in orbit. So if you want to avoid a collision, you have to maneuver your spacecraft, which takes up fuel and is costly. Additionally, we have humans on the International Space Station who sometimes must go outside the spacecraft where the space debris can hit them too. It’s really dangerous.”

The world’s most efficient solar cell: Chinese researchers explain how they designed and built it

Earlier in 2025, Chinese solar manufacturer Longi announced it had built the world’s most efficient solar cell. The hybrid interdigitated back-contact (HIBC) cell achieved 27.81% efficiency, which was verified by Germany’s Institute for Solar Energy Research Hamelin (ISFH).

Now, in a paper published in the journal Nature, researchers are sharing the technical details of their breakthrough.

For solar technology to deliver on its promise, solar cells and panels must convert as much sunlight as possible into energy. Typically, standard cells achieve up to 26% efficiency, that is, they convert 26% of the sunlight hitting them into electrical energy.

Perovskite photovoltaics prepare for their time in the sun

To capture more of the Sun’s spectrum, Steve Albrecht of the Technical University of Berlin and the Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Energy added a third layer of perovskite to make a so-called triple-junction cell, which could potentially offer even higher efficiencies. “It is truly a product of the future,” he says.

Other researchers are teaming perovskites with organic solar cells, forming flexible tandems suitable for indoor applications, or to cover vehicles. Yi Hou of the National University of Singapore points out that the perovskite layer filters ultraviolet light that would damage the organic cell. His team made a flexible perovskite–organic tandem5 with a record efficiency of 26.7%, and he is commercializing the technology through his company Singfilm Solar.

Despite the promising efficiency results, there was broad consensus at the conference that long-term stability is the field’s most pressing issue. Collaboration between researchers from academia, industry and national labs will be vital to fix that, says Marina Leite at the University of California, Davis: “We can work together to finally resolve the problem of stability in perovskites and truly enable this technology in the near future.”

New solar-powered Nissan EV can drive 3,000 km a year without ever plugging in

Nissan just announced a solar-powered EV based on the Nissan Sakura for this year’s Japan Mobility Show.

Built using the super popular kei car as a platform, the solar-powered Sakura promises ‘free’ motoring thanks to its solar panels.

In theory, you can drive it for a year without ever plugging it in.

Quantum Breakthrough Unlocks Potential of “Miracle Material” for Future Electronics

Graphene is a remarkable “miracle” material, consisting of a single, atom-thin layer of tightly connected carbon atoms that remains both stable and highly conductive. These qualities make it valuable for many technologies, including flexible screens, sensitive detectors, high-performance batteries, and advanced solar cells.

A new study, carried out by the University of Göttingen in collaboration with teams in Braunschweig and Bremen in Germany, as well as Fribourg in Switzerland, shows that graphene may be even more versatile than previously believed.

For the first time, researchers have directly identified “Floquet effects” in graphene. This finding settles a long-running question: Floquet engineering – an approach that uses precise light pulses to adjust a material’s properties – can also be applied to metallic and semi-metallic quantum materials like graphene. The work appears in Nature Physics.

Google’s plan for space-based computing

The sun produces more power than 100 trillion times humanity’s entire electricity generation. In orbit, solar panels can be eight times more productive than their Earth-bound counterparts, generating energy almost continuously without the need for heavy battery storage. These facts have led a team of Google researchers to ask what if the best place to scale artificial intelligence isn’t on Earth at all, but in space?

Project Suncatcher, Google’s latest space mission, envisions constellations of solar-powered satellites equipped with processors and connected by laser-based optical links. The concept tackles one of AI’s most pressing challenges, the enormous energy demands of large-scale machine learning systems, by tapping directly into the solar system’s ultimate power source. A new research paper published by Google describes their progress toward addressing the technical challenges.

The proposed system would operate in a sun-synchronous low Earth orbit, where satellites remain in almost constant sunlight. This orbital choice maximizes solar energy collection while minimizing battery requirements. However, making space-based AI infrastructure viable requires solving several formidable engineering challenges.

New lightweight polymer film can prevent corrosion

MIT researchers have developed a lightweight polymer film that is nearly impenetrable to gas molecules, raising the possibility that it could be used as a protective coating to prevent solar cells and other infrastructure from corrosion, and to slow the aging of packaged food and medicines.

The polymer, which can be applied as a film mere nanometers thick, completely repels nitrogen and other gases, as far as can be detected by laboratory equipment, the researchers found. That degree of impermeability has never been seen before in any polymer, and rivals the impermeability of molecularly-thin crystalline materials such as graphene.

“Our polymer is quite unusual. It’s obviously produced from a solution-phase polymerization reaction, but the product behaves like graphene, which is gas-impermeable because it’s a perfect crystal. However, when you examine this material, one would never confuse it with a perfect crystal,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

Research drives commercialization of energy-efficient solar cell technology toward 40% efficiency milestone

Third-generation solar cell technology is advancing rapidly. An engineering research team at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has achieved a breakthrough in the field of perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells (TSCs), focusing on addressing challenges that include improving efficiency, stability and scalability.

The team has conducted a comprehensive analysis of TSC performance and provided strategic recommendations, which aim to raise the energy conversion efficiency of this new type of solar cell from the current maximum of approximately 34% to about 40%.

The team hopes to accelerate the commercialization of /silicon TSCs through industry-academia-research collaboration, while aligning with the nation’s strategic plan of carbon peaking and neutrality and promoting the development of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence through .

Long-term stability for perovskite solar cells achieved with fluorinated barrier compound

Perovskite solar cells are inexpensive to produce and generate a high amount of electric power per surface area. However, they are not yet stable enough, losing efficiency more rapidly than the silicon market standard. Now, an international team led by Prof. Dr. Antonio Abate has dramatically increased their stability by applying a novel coating to the interface between the surface of the perovskite and the top contact layer. This has even boosted efficiency to almost 27%, which represents the state-of-the-art.

After 1,200 hours of continuous operation under standard illumination, no decrease in efficiency was observed. The study involved research teams from China, Italy, Switzerland and Germany and has been published in Nature Photonics.

“We used a fluorinated compound that can slide between the perovskite and the buckyball (C60) contact layer, forming an almost compact monomolecular film,” explains Abate. These Teflon-like molecular layer chemically isolate the perovskite layer from the contact layer, resulting in fewer defects and losses. Additionally, the intermediate layer increases the structural stability of both adjacent layers, particularly the C60 layer, making it more uniform and compact.

/* */