js2j@mhuxt.UUCP (sonntag) (09/04/84)
Have I missed something? Everyone else seems to be pursuing this discussion on the assumption that powersats would reflect an amount of light roughtly equal in magnitude as the moon. Why should a powersat do that? I know there are many different ways in which such a satellite could be configured, but all of the ways I can think of would involve focusing sunlight onto some kind of (on the satellite) collector and then beaming the energy down to a huge microwave antenna. In this kind of scheme, little or no light would be reflected back to the earth. So what kind of powersat are all of you talking about? How does it work and why does it reflect all of this sunlight instead of collecting it? Or are you talking about astronomy in the microwave spectrum only? I guess spillover from the power beam would give you unusually high amounts of background "noise", but it would all be at one known frequency anyhow, so it could be filtered out. Confused, Jeff Sonntag ihnp4!mhuxl!mhuxt!js2j