Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-07-31

The Drowned Sun

A drowned sun: the pile is the first light this ocean has ever had, and the ice is learning what a shadow is.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A dark, entirely soft-focus underwater scene in cyan and black. A tall, blunt, tapering industrial tower stands dead centre as a near-black silhouette, widening from a flat top to a broad plinth that sinks into the sediment at the bottom of the frame; two long fins run down each flank and two slack cables rise from its head toward the top of the picture. The light comes from behind and below it: a wide, low bloom whose heart is warm cream-gold and whose spread is cyan, flaring out on both sides of the tower and throwing faint rays through the water. Across the top of the frame a dark ceiling of ice hangs down in rounded pendant lobes, its undersides catching a pale cyan sheen. Suspended particles drift through the whole depth as small soft points and out-of-focus discs. Everything is blurred, grainy, vignetted and slightly colour-fringed at the edges, like a long underwater exposure on damaged film. Nothing shown exists.
An artistic imagining, rendered procedurally, of a fission pile moored in Europa's under-ice ocean — the only sun that water will ever have, seen from inside the dark with its glow flaring around the reactor's own silhouette and the ice ceiling lit from below. Europa is believed to hold a global saltwater ocean beneath an ice shell kilometers thick, and fission reactors have flown in space since SNAP-10A in 1965, but nothing like this pile has been built or placed there. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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