Door dust can help astronauts to supply power to sustainable moon cities. The method is as follows:

The moon dust is a magical material that can extract other elements such as oxygen and titanium, which can form a brick to form a “lunarcrete” to create a lunar shelter or bundle the brick. And now scientists have shown how they can change the lunar cell to solar cells.

“To extract fuel water and build a house with a moon brick, scientists How to use moon dust“Felix Lang at Potsdam University in Germany name. “Now we can turn it into solar cells, and may probably provide energy in the future. moon The city will be needed. “

Traditional solar cells are included earth-The glass manufactured is relatively heavy and the cost of firing can increase. Therefore, making solar cells on the moon of local materials is an attractive proposal.

Vision for the manufacture of the future solar cell using raw regolith. The robot is displayed to a production facility that supplies Raw Regolith and produces perovskite -based Moon Solar Cells. Later, automated rovers or astronauts installed the produced solar cells to supply power to the future moon habitats or cities. (Image credit: sercan özen)

To test this idea, LANG led the team that experimented with the lunar dust simulation. The moon’s material sample lacks supply and is valuable to scientists. Therefore, there is a cottage industry led by NASA’s Simulant Development Laboratory, which generates various types of simulation lunar calendar. (Regolith is a technical term of material on the moon surface of dust and impact ejecta).

relevant: China plans to build a moon base in the lunar Antarctica by 2035.

The group of LANG melted some of this simulated Regolith and formed “MOONGLASS”. This is a simple process that can be achieved simply by focusing on the sun that falls on the moon to achieve high temperatures.

MOONGLASS is combined with Perovskite. Perovskite is a crystalline material commonly used in solar cells that absorb sunlight. former In their atomic structure. The electrode then draws these excited electrons and generates current.

Scientist team Blue originJeff Bezos’ aerospace company is before I suggested in a similar way Configure solar cells on the moon.

MOONGLASS has some advantages compared to general glass made of ground materials. In space, regular glass tends to turn brown, which begins to prevent some of the coming sunlight, reducing the efficiency of solar cells. MOONGLASS already has a natural brown tone as a result of regolith’s impurities, which actually prevents brown anymore. It is also more resistant to radiation, which is an important consideration in the universe. Space beam Left, right and central flight.

Photo collage shows the moon in the background, the circular dummy of the moon dust and the small rectangular electronic product components

Daljiris Simulat, Dallas and Dal Solar Battery. Insertion shows the cross -sectional microscopy and the ferrov sky crystal structure. (Image Credit: Felix Lang)

The lack of Dallas -based solar cells is efficiency. Traditional solar cells used in space are efficiency, that is, the percentage of accidents that convert to electricity, between 30% and 40%. MOONGLASS -based solar cells are currently only 10%, but LANG’s team thinks that up to 23%can be achieved by removing some impurities of MOONGLASS.

But even if they can’t do it, low efficiency is not necessarily a problem. “It doesn’t require a very efficient 30% solar cell and creates more on the moon, which also has the advantage of creating solar cells in the moon, which reduces the mass and cost of the earth’s launch mass and cost, saving 99% of the material transport weight.

relevant: NASA can build one or more moon foundations for Artemis Lunar Missions.

There is still no answer. It is one thing to manufacture solar cells in the dust simulation of the earth’s normal gravity. It is another thing to make the gravity low, and the low gravity can affect how well the Dallas is formed. The solvent used to handle the ferrovskit can be decomposed when exposed to vacuum conditions, while a large temperature change between the lunar day and night can affect the stability of the solar cell as it expands and contracts.

In order to try and answer some of these uncertainty, LANG’s team insists on a small mission for the moon to test solar cells under the actual lunar condition. Rewards can be a huge person if they succeed, provide the moon base and make the moon’s long -term settlement more plausible. Such foundations can be located in the Antarctica of the moon, and there are many water ice hidden inside the crater that is permanently dark. sun In other places of the moon, we shorten the solar mission to avoid night nights for two weeks.

This study is described in the paper published today in the journal device (April 3).

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