Informal learning environments (ILEs) like museums incorporate multi-modal displays into their exhibits as a way to engage a wider group of visitors, often relying on tactile, audio, and visual means to accomplish this. Planetariums, however, represent one type of ILE where a single, highly visual presentation modality is used to entertain, inform, and engage a large group of users in a passive...

Expressions for water and glass temperatures, hourly yield and instantaneous efficiency for both passive and active solar distillation systems have been derived. The analysis is based on the basic energy balance for both the systems. A computer model has been developed to predict the performance of the stills based on both the inner and the outer glass temperatures of the solar stills. In the p...

A de-orbiting strategy for small satellites, in particular CubeSats, is proposed which exploits the effect of solar radiation pressure to increase the spacecraft orbit eccentricity so that the perigee falls below an altitude where atmospheric drag will cause the spacecraft orbit to naturally decay. This is achieved by fitting the spacecraft with an inflatable reflective balloon. Once this is fu...

Context. The determination of horizontal velocity fields at the solar surface is crucial to understanding the dynamics and magnetism of the convection zone of the sun. These measurements can be done by tracking granules. Aims. Tracking granules from ground-based observations, however, suffers from the Earth’s atmospheric turbulence, which induces image distortion. The focus of this paper is to ...

Radiative cooling technology utilizes the atmospheric transparency window (8-13 μm) to passively dissipate heat from Earth into outer space (3 K). This technology has attracted broad interests from both fundamental sciences and real world applications, ranging from passive building cooling, renewable energy harvesting and passive refrigeration in arid regions. However, the temperature reduction...