Last October, the sky over Stanford, California, was apparent for several nights. And this was good news for researcher Sid Assawaworrarit and his colleagues. He tells IE that those conditions were “probably the best of the year.
Assaworrarit is not a grateful astronomer that clouds didn’t stop starlight from travelling through the atmosphere and reaching his telescope’s mirror. As an electrical engineer, he welcomed cloudless nights for a very different reason: a clear night means that infrared light from the surface of solar panels is free to radiate into space.
This flow of energy allows the device developed by Assaworrarit and his colleagues, an ordinary solar panel equipped with a thermoelectric generator, to generate a small amount of electricity from the slight temperature difference between the surrounding air and the surface of a committee that shows deep in space.
