Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-05-31

Kept and Counted

The depot keeps the sun in nine standing cells, and a second drawing laid over the first says how much of it is left in each.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A warm gold scene on a pale bone ground. Nine tall storage cells stand in an uneven rank across the middle of a square frame, silhouetted against a narrow band of dark space scattered with faint stars. Each cell is a dark stacked casing with a tall sight column set off its centre line, and inside each column a glowing amber charge rises from the base to a bright level line; the levels differ from cell to cell, two of them nearly brimming and one drawn almost flat. Above the rank the whole upper third of the picture is the sunlit underside of a thin-film concentrator canopy, pale wheat, ribbed with long film seams and brightest toward the upper left, and two leaning masts carry glowing down leads from the canopy into the heads of two cells. Below the rank a sintered apron recedes toward the viewer in a soft warm gradient: a glowing trunk line runs across it with a short feeder from each cell plinth, a low tug sits at a berth on the left with a lit cable into its flank, a smaller hauler waits out on the open apron at the right, and one suited figure stands near a plinth for scale. Printed over the whole scene, slightly out of register up and to the right, is a second flat drawing: pale rectangular capacity outlines around each cell, diagonal hatching filling the charged fraction of each outline with a level rule at its top, and in dark graphite on the apron a long datum rule carrying nine small capacity boxes filled to the same fractions, with an interrupted vertical margin rail of uneven ticks down the left edge. No text or lettering appears anywhere in the image.
An artistic imagining of energy storage at a Jupiter Trojan: nine standing cells on a sintered apron hold charge for the vehicles that come through, some brimming and some drawn nearly flat, under a thin-film concentrator canopy, with a second drawing of the same rank printed over the scene slightly out of register to report the state of each. Sunlight at Jupiter's distance is roughly four percent of what reaches Earth, and the Trojan swarms are real bodies that NASA's Lucy mission is surveying, but a depot like this one does not exist. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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