Although the annealing effect of radiation-exposed solar cells has been shown in the past to lead to the recovery of degradable photovoltaic (PV) performance, the recovery of today's standard triple-junction cell has yet to be shown. The current proposal is to devise a novel optical-based instrumentation that is optimal for performing degradation recovery for multi-junction solar cells and future multijunction cells. With the intent to reduce cost of Space-base solar power, maximizing the lifetime of the powerplant would be key. With the advent of on-orbit servicing capability, one can foresee that the next bottleneck for life extension would be recovery of PV performance. Besides complimenting on-orbit serving capability, such solar cell recovery would, in the near-term, enable the logistic business between LEO and GEO and economical deployment of lunar rovers.
