WASHINGTON — NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot’s arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander’s instruments.
Mission engineers last received a signal [...]

We have all enjoyed watching rainbows and at some point wanted to travel to the end of them for those fabled pots of gold. We can make out the distinct seven colors of the rainbows. But what we see as colors are actually different frequencies or energy levels of the sunlight. A solar panel converts [...]

We all want to get rid of our dependency on fossil fuels and their side effects. Alternative sources of energy seems clean and green but they have a poor conversion rate which makes some people extra cynical about the viability of renewable energy. But researchers at U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) [...]

When a manufacturer offers a product in the market its main aim is to penetrate in the market as deeply and as widely as possible. In short he wants to make it available to the common man. Till now solar panels are quite expensive and have a long payback period. That fact contributes to its [...]

According to the latest “Monthly Energy Review” issued by the U.S. Energy Information Administration this week, renewable energy accounted for more than 10% of the domestically-produced energy used in the United States in the first half of 2008.
For the period January 1 to June 30, 2008, the United States consumed 50.673 quadrillion Btus (quads) of [...]