Diagrams — free to use with credit

Every diagram on OrbitalSolar is drawn here, from regulatory filings and published mission records rather than from stock artwork or company renders. They are released under CC BY 4.0: use them in articles, lessons, papers or slides, including commercially, as long as you credit OrbitalSolar.ai.

Eärendil-1 has not launched, so no photographs of it exist. The schematic below is built from the specifications in the filings and is labelled as such.

Logarithmic bar chart of Reflect Orbital’s published brightness targets against familiar light levels: 0.1 lux for five minutes in 2026 against a full moon at 0.25 lux, 2 lux in 2027, 100 lux in 2028 against street lighting at 15 and office lighting at 500, 5,000 lux in 2030, and 36,000 lux for hours at a time in 2035 — between overcast daylight at 10,000 lux and direct midday sun at 100,000.
How bright, against things you can judge Lux figures are hard to intuit, so the company’s own published targets are placed beside light levels anyone can judge. The scale is logarithmic because the range spans six orders of magnitude. The 2035 target — 36,000 lux, held for hours — sits between overcast daylight and direct sun. From Reflect Orbital’s roadmap · vector version · CC BY 4.0 — reuse it anywhere with credit to OrbitalSolar.ai
Schematic of the Eärendil-1 space mirror: an 18 by 18 metre aluminised Mylar reflector on a deployable boom frame, with solar panels and satellite bus labelled, drawn from confirmed public specifications.
Eärendil-1 spacecraft schematic Drawn from the confirmed public specifications in Reflect Orbital’s FCC filings — not an official render, and no photographs exist because the spacecraft has not launched. From Eärendil-1 · vector version · CC BY 4.0 — reuse it anywhere with credit to OrbitalSolar.ai
Diagram showing how an orbital mirror works: the Sun on the left, a mirror on an orbital path at 500 to 625 kilometres reflecting sunlight down through the terminator onto the night side of Earth, producing a spot five to eight kilometres across while travelling at 7.6 kilometres per second.
How a space mirror works, in one picture The whole idea in one view: the mirror is still in sunlight while the ground below is already dark, and the reflected patch is a few kilometres wide and moving at orbital speed. The technical version of the same geometry is above. From What is a space mirror? · vector version · CC BY 4.0 — reuse it anywhere with credit to OrbitalSolar.ai
Diagram of sun-synchronous orbit and terminator geometry: a mirror at 625 kilometres crosses the day-night boundary, reflecting sunlight to a ground site already in darkness, giving a window of a few minutes per pass.
Why a space mirror only works at dawn and dusk A mirror can only light a place that is dark while the mirror itself is still in sunlight. That geometry confines the service to the hour after dusk and before dawn, and to a few minutes per pass. The figures shown are the general sun-synchronous case — 500 km at 97°, a 94-minute period. Eärendil-1 itself flies higher and less inclined, at 625 km and 88°. From Orbital mechanics of space mirrors · vector version · CC BY 4.0 — reuse it anywhere with credit to OrbitalSolar.ai
Diagram of the Znamya-2 experiment of February 1993: a 20 metre reflector deployed from the Progress M-15 spacecraft after undocking from Mir at 400 kilometres, casting a five kilometre spot of light that tracked west to east across France, Europe and Russia.
Znamya-2, 1993 — the first orbital mirror The only orbital mirror ever successfully deployed. Znamya-2 cast a roughly five-kilometre spot across Europe in February 1993; the larger Znamya-2.5 failed during deployment in 1999 and nothing has flown since. From Znamya · vector version · CC BY 4.0 — reuse it anywhere with credit to OrbitalSolar.ai