Long read
Power
Europe’s slower-burning space fuel
Americium gives you about a fifth of the heat per gram of plutonium-238. The interesting bit is what happens after you put that number into a spacecraft.
8 min read
THE WHOLE SHELF
The archive
Long explanations, small observations, and a few things from the workbench.
Nine entries, newest first.
9 entries
Working notes
Power
The lunar night is a battery problem, too
Two weeks in the dark, five watts of housekeeping, and a battery that gets rather heavy. Some back-of-an-envelope arithmetic.
3 min read
Short note
Workshop
A watt is not a watt-hour
A small complaint about units, prompted by the label on a battery pack and an entirely avoidable cup of cold tea.
2 min read
Explainer
Spacecraft
Juno’s solar panels have a very large postcode
Solar power at Jupiter works. It just comes with a lot of panel, a careful orbit, and very little room for casual assumptions.
2 min read
Explainer
Spacecraft
What the gold blanket actually does
It is not a duvet, and the crinkles are not evidence of careless packing. A note on the most recognisable material in spacecraft photographs.
2 min read
Mission note
Spacecraft
Four watts, and what you turn off next
Voyager’s shrinking power budget is easy to quote and harder to sit with. Turning off an instrument also turns off a kind of question.
2 min read
Short note
Workshop
The connector I kept
A small, unremarkable object from the bottom of a drawer. It has outlasted the project and most of my tidy-desk resolutions.
2 min read
Working notes
Spacecraft
Listening slowly
Why a weak signal can still carry useful information, provided you have a large dish, a quiet receiver, and some patience.
2 min read
Notebook no. 1
Power
Start with the heat leak
Before choosing a heater, draw the box it has to keep warm. The first page of this notebook, with a deliberately simple calculation.
2 min read
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