Combining “moonglass” with just two pounds of perovskite from Earth would yield 4,300 square feet of solar panels.
NASA’s plan to establish a permanent human presence on the moon will require making better use of lunar resources. A new approach has now shown how to make solar cells out of moon dust.
Later this decade, the US space agency’s Artemis III mission plans to return astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than half a century. The long-term goal of the Artemis program is to establish a permanent human presence on our nearest celestial neighbor.
But building and supplying such a base means launching huge amounts of material into orbit at great cost. That’s why NASA and other space agencies interested in establishing a presence on the moon are exploring “in-situ resource utilization”—that is, exploiting the resources already there.
Moon dust, or regolith, has been widely touted as a potential building material, while ice in the moon’s shadowy craters could be harvested for drinking water or split into oxygen and hydrogen that can be used for air in habitats or as rocket fuel.
Now, researchers at the University of Potsdam, Germany, have found a way to turn a simulated version of lunar regolith into glass for solar cells—the most obvious way to power a moon base. They say this could dramatically reduce the amount of material that would have to be hauled to the moon to set up a permanent settlement.
“From extracting water for fuel to building houses with lunar bricks, scientists have been finding ways to use moon dust,” lead researcher Felix Lang said in a press release. “Now, we can turn it into solar cells too, possibly providing the energy a future moon city will need.”
To test out their approach, the researchers used an artificial mixture of minerals designed to replicate the soil found in the moon’s highlands. Crucially, their approach doesn’t require any complex mining or purification equipment. The regolith simply needs to be melted and then cooled gradually to create sheets of what the researchers refer to as “moonglass.”
In their experiments, reported in the journal Device, the researchers used an electric furnace to heat the dust to around 2,800 degrees fahrenheit. They say these kinds of temperatures could be achieved on the moon by using mirrors or lenses to concentrate sunlight.
They then deposited an ultrathin layer of a material called halide perovskite—which has emerged as a cheap and powerful alternative to silicon in solar cells—onto the moonglass. This material would have to be carried from Earth, but the researchers estimate that a little more than two pounds of it would be enough to fabricate 4,300 square feet of solar panels.
The team tested out several solar-cell designs, achieving efficiencies between 9.4 and 12.1 percent. That’s significantly less than the 30 to 40 percent that the most advanced space solar cells achieve, the researchers concede. But the lower efficiency would be more than offset by the massive savings in launch costs missions might realize by making the bulkiest parts of the solar cell on site.
“If you cut the weight by 99 percent, you don’t need ultra-efficient 30 percent solar cells, you just make more of them on the moon,” says Lang.
The moonglass the researchers created also has a natural brownish tint that helps protect it against radiation, a major issue on the moon’s surface. They also note that halide perovskites tolerate relatively high levels of impurities and defects, which makes them well-suited to the less than perfect fabrication setups likely to be found on the moon.
The moon’s low gravity and wild temperature swings could play havoc with their fabrication process and the stability of the resulting solar cells, the researchers admit. That’s why they’re hoping to send a small-scale experiment to the moon to test the idea out in real conditions.
While the approach is probably at too early a stage to impact NASA’s upcoming moon missions, it could prove a valuable tool as we scale up our presence beyond Earth orbit.
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* This article was originally published at Singularity Hub
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