[drunx]

I'm by no means closer or educated enough on astrophysics or anything to do with space. Hence I have a very "commoner" question:

- asteroids? Debris? It's there even any risk of anything significantly big to be damaged by something flying by?

"About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface."

I assume a good old "Prius" might have opinions about such construction of it flies through it.

But I guess "space is big", risks are low?

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...

[porphyra]

The solar array is 4 km by 4 km. The whole Earth, with its 6400 km radius, only gets hit by a Prius-sized asteroid once per year. So the risks are much lower. I guess the array may be hit by many micro-asteroids though, but it should be possible to engineer some level of tolerance for that.

[drunx]

Yeah.. right after writing the comment I went on to get my frame of reference a bit adjusted about the sizes of everything...:) Risks are very small! So small that it's not even worth worrying about it too much. The whole cooling/heat transfer reality check is way more critical here than anything else indeed.