FURI | Spring 2019

The Dynamic Reconfiguration of Solar Cells on Spacecrafts

Currently, spacecraft solar arrays can degrade from 20-50% in power producing capability over a 15-year mission, making it unfeasible for current state-of-the-art designs to access the full power available from the solar array. The objective of this research is to elongate the duration of spacecraft missions by creating a gallium nitride (GaN) switch that will dynamically reconfigure dead or near-death solar cells while they are in space, on their missions. A switch has been designed and coded that will be temperature and radiation robust so that it will endure the difficulties of launch and space travel.