A startup taking an alternative approach to space-based solar power has raised $50 million as it works towards a first demonstration mission next year.
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A conference later this month will explore space-interception concepts, with particular interest in boost-phase capabilities.
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NASA’s latest call for proposals for private astronaut missions to the space station opens the door to having those missions commanded by someone other than a former NASA astronaut.
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Space companies joined heavy stock market declines across the board as governments started responding to sweeping U.S. tariffs across dozens of countries.
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The contracts, announced April 4 by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command, are part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 2 procurement
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A Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down off the California coast April 4, wrapping up a three-and-a-half-day private astronaut mission in polar orbit.
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This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features William Phillips, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on cooling and trapping atoms using laser light.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Physics World’s Margaret Harris, Phillips talks about his long-time fascination with quantum physics – which began with an undergraduate project on electron spin resonance. Phillips chats about quirky quantum phenomena such as entanglement and superposition and explains how they are exploited in atomic clocks and quantum computing. He also looks to the future of quantum technologies and stresses the importance of curiosity-led research.
Phillips has spent much of his career at US’s National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland and he also a professor of physics at the University of Maryland.
This podcast is supported by Atlas Technologies, specialists in custom aluminium and titanium vacuum chambers as well as bonded bimetal flanges and fittings used everywhere from physics labs to semiconductor fabs.
This article forms part of Physics World‘s contribution to the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), which aims to raise global awareness of quantum physics and its applications.
Stayed tuned to Physics World and our international partners throughout the next 12 months for more coverage of the IYQ.
Find out more on our quantum channel.
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On January 27, President Trump ordered the Pentagon to develop “a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield,” which, inspired by Israel’s Iron […]
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Scientists in the US have developed a new type of photovoltaic battery that runs on the energy given off by nuclear waste. The battery uses a scintillator crystal to transform the intense gamma rays from radioisotopes into electricity and can produce more than a microwatt of power. According to its developers at Ohio State University and the University of Toledo, it could be used to power microelectronic devices such as microchips.
The idea of a nuclear waste battery is not new. Indeed, Raymond Cao, the Ohio State nuclear engineer who led the new research effort, points out that the first experiments in this field date back to the early 1950s. These studies, he explains, used a 50 milli-Curie 90Sr-90Y source to produce electricity via the electron-voltaic effect in p-n junction devices.
However, the maximum power output of these devices was just 0.8 μW, and their power conversion efficiency (PCE) was an abysmal 0.4 %. Since then, the PCE of nuclear voltaic batteries has remained low, typically in the 1–3% range, and even the most promising devices have produced, at best, a few hundred nanowatts of power.
Cao is confident that his team’s work will change this. “Our yet-to-be-optimized battery has already produced 1.5 μW,” he says, “and there is much room for improvement.”
To achieve this benchmark, Cao and colleagues focused on a different physical process called the nuclear photovoltaic effect. This effect captures the energy from highly-penetrating gamma rays indirectly, by coupling a photovoltaic solar cell to a scintillator crystal that emits visible light when it absorbs radiation. This radiation can come from several possible sources, including nuclear power plants, storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel, space- and submarine-based nuclear reactors or, really, anyplace that happens to have large amounts of gamma ray-producing radioisotopes on hand.
The scintillator crystal Cao and colleagues used is gadolinium aluminium garnet (GAGG), and they attached it to a solar cell made from polycrystalline CdTe. The resulting device measures around 2 x 2 x 1 cm, and they tested it using intense gamma rays emitted by two different radioactive sources, 137Cs and 60Co, that produced 1.5 kRad/h and 10 kRad/h, respectively. 137Cs is the most common fission product found in spent nuclear fuel, while 60Co is an activation product.
The Ohio-Toledo team found that the maximum power output of their battery was around 288 nW with the 137Cs source. Using the 60Co irradiator boosted this to 1.5 μW. “The greater the radiation intensity, the more light is produced, resulting in increased electricity generation,” Cao explains.
The higher figure is already enough to power a microsensor, he says, and he and his colleagues aim to scale the system up to milliwatts in future efforts. However, they acknowledge that doing so presents several challenges. Scaling up the technology will be expensive, and gamma radiation gradually damages both the scintillator and the solar cell. To overcome the latter problem, Cao says they will need to replace the materials in their battery with new ones. “We are interested in finding alternative scintillator and solar cell materials that are more radiation-hard,” he tells Physics World.
The researchers are optimistic, though, arguing that optimized nuclear photovoltaic batteries could be a viable option for harvesting ambient radiation that would otherwise be wasted. They report their work in Optical Materials X.
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A small spacecraft earlier this year successfully demonstrated edge autonomy — or the capability of a satellite to analyze data and make decisions independently without waiting for instructions from ground […]
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China's space ambitions raise concerns at U.S. commission hearing
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Toulouse (France) – 11/03/2025 – Exail, a global leader in space communication solutions, announces the launch of Spacelink-PCE, its latest-generation Propagation Channel Emulator. Designed to accurately replicate the radio propagation […]
The post Exail unveils Spacelink-PCE, a new propagation channel emulator for satellite communication enhanced appeared first on SpaceNews.
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