Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-07-10

Fortissimo at Perihelion

At Mercury the sun plays fortissimo — eleven arcs of one crescendo — and the solar farm is the ruled score that holds it.

An artistic imagining, not a real installation: a flat Swiss-modernist poster composition on warm paper white. From a small deep-navy disc in the upper right, eleven concentric blue arc bands sweep down and left, growing steadily thicker and longer like a musical crescendo, bursting past the top and right edges of the frame. Below them a strict modular grid of 77 flat rectangular solar-panel tiles in stepped blues, palest nearest the disc and deepest at the far corner, holds the page; where the arcs cross the tiles the blues overprint two steps darker, like screenprint ink.
An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: a solar farm on Mercury drawn as a Swiss score, where the sun — eleven times brighter than at Earth — plays fortissimo in eleven widening arcs and the ruled grid of panels below holds the chord. At perihelion, Mercury receives about 14.4 kilowatts per square meter, roughly eleven Earth suns on every panel. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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