Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-04-09

The Sun Handed Down

The rim keeps the sunlight and the shadow keeps the cold, so three mirrors hand the one down into the other.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A violet field tilted so that nothing in the frame is level. A black sky fills the upper left, cut off by the long shallow curve of a crater rim; everything below the rim is the graded violet gloom of a permanently shadowed crater floor. A hard white band of sunlight runs along above the rim from the upper right corner, where the sky glows violet with the sun just outside the frame. Three flat white mirror plates of decreasing size hang from that band of light, and each drops a solid white shaft of reflected light down into the shadow. Each shaft lands on a dark violet collector plate ruled into a fine grid of cells, and where a shaft strikes, a pale flat plane is cut into the plate. The largest collector floats near the centre of the frame with a slender two stage mast hanging free beneath it. A small red block at its lower edge feeds a bright violet line that runs down across the field into a low dark building with one lit aperture. Two small dark squares float in the empty violet void.
An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: solar collectors standing in the permanent shadow of a crater at Mercury's pole, fed by mirrors that reach up over the rim into sunlight and hand it down into the cold. Sunlight at Mercury's perihelion is roughly ten times as intense as at Earth's distance while the floors of some polar craters never see the sun at all, so the fiercest light in the inner solar system and a place cold enough to hold water ice sit a few kilometres apart. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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