Array Fill

Thinsats should be in continuous sunlight for maximum radio and computational power. If one thinsat shades or partially occludes the other, the result will be a loss of power, and nonuniform temperature changes. Thinsats will need to actively and cooperatively move to keep from shading each other.

The sun is 1,391,980 km in diameter, and 149,600,000 km away (on average). Its angular size is 9.3E-3 radians, or 0.53 degrees. A thinsat sized disk 20cm in diameter casts a black shadow up to 22 meters behind it, with a shaded penumbra in a narrow 0.53 degree cone widening to infinity. The penumbra cone is a meter wide 107 meters behind a thinsat, and 10 meters wide 1070 meters behind. However, the amount of shading diminishes with distance, too, though more thinsats in the front will contribute their shadows, too. Suffice it to say that thinsats in the back of the array will get somewhat less light, on average, than those in the front, and the amount of light will have ripples in it. For that reason, we cannot pack an array too densely.

The three dimensional spacing functions used in deployment will require a lot of research to optimize; they must also be compatible with a dither function that smears out grating lobes. There are some great opportunities for research here, and I hope the best functions will be developed for the public domain. However, mathematical functions are difficult to patent, and hopefully there will be an infinite number of suitable patterns, so the patent trolls will need to spend an infinite amount of filing fees to cover all of them.

We can characterize these functions by a "fill factor". Assuming a thinsat area of A = 0.024 m2, and a three dimensional array of N x N x N or N3 thinsats, and a spacing of L, then the fill factor is defined as FF = N3*A/(N*L)2 = N*A/L2. For larger arrays, with many overlapping penumbras in the back, the average illumination in the back is (1-FF), and the temperature of the thinsats will be proportional to the 4th root of that. So if the average thinsat temperature is 330K under normal conditions, it might be 310K in the back of the array with a fill factor of 0.2, and 322K with a fill factor of 0.05 . We can probably survive a fill factor of 0.2, though we must manage thermals carefully and avoid full shading.

For FF=0.2, A=0.024, the array spacing L = sqrt( N * A / FF ). The array contains N3 thinsats, the array edge is NL, the array mass M is 0.003kg*N3, the array power is approximately P = 3W*N3, and the main lobe ground spot diameter G at 10,000 km and 4mm wavelength is G = 40000 m2/N*L :

N

N3

M(kg)

P

G (m)

L (m)

N*L (m)

10

1000

3

3kW

3636

1.10

11

20

8000

24

24kW

1291

1.55

31

32

32768

98

98kW

638

1.96

63

50

125000

375

375kW

326

2.44

123

64

262144

786

786KW

225

2.77

177

100

1000000

3000

3.0MW

115

3.46

346

128

2.1M

6300

6.3MW

80

3.92

502

700

343M

1030t

1.0GW

6

9.17

6420

Note: we can always defocus the beam. The last entry, 700 thinsats cubed, is a solar power satellite equivalent of a full sized power plant. If it put 1GW into a 6 meter diameter area, it would heat it to 5000K - a weapon, if the heat did not spread out in the atmosphere, and if most of the energy did not end up in sidelobe power.

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