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Nuna 1 (or simply Nuna) was a car powered by solar-power, developed by students from the Delft University of Technology.
The first Nuna Team (The so-called Alpha Centauri Team) was founded in 2000 by Ramon Martinez and Tim de Lange. The project was sponsored by Nuon. Thanks to this financial help the team was able to finish their first car: Nuna 1. The team consisted mainly out of students from the Delft University of Technology who were guided by former astronaut Wubbo Ockels.
The Nuna won the World Solar Challenge in Australia in 2001, the race started in Darwin in the north to Adelaide in the south. It was the first time that the Dutch team participated in the race. The 3021 km long race was finished in 32 hours and 39 minutes, breaking the old record by the Honda-team from 1996 (33 hours and 32 minutes). The average speed was 91.8 kilometer per hour.
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The car's shell was covered with the best dual junction and triple junction gallium-arsenide solar cells, developed for satellites. These cells had an efficiency of about 24%. The European Space Agency (ESA) was about to test these cells in space in early 2003, when the technology-demonstrating SMART-1 mission was scheduled to launched to the Moon.[1]
A small strip of silicon solar cells on the side of the car was very special for a different reason: the communication equipment was powered by a strip of cells that originally belonged to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These cells were part of a large solar array, retrieved by ESA astronaut Claude Nicollier and brought back to Earth in 1993 with a Space Shuttle. They have been donated to the Alpha Centauri Team as a special mascot.