Description
The International Space Station’s eight solar array wings are the station’s sole source of power generation. It has been showed that the ISS spends approximately 98% of its time in orbital paths that experience Earth eclipse. During these times, the SAWs must generate enough extra power to charge the station’s batteries, which must power the station when it is in the Earth’s shadow. The decrease in energy production during these orbits means a decrease in the power available to experimental payloads, which already have a small power budget. Even a small improvement in SAW power generation during Earth-eclipsed orbits would allow more experiments to be conducted. In this research, this goal was achieved by manipulating the solar array gimbal orientations in order to decrease the amount of shadows cast onto the solar arrays.
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