Demonstrating that the base of a solar panel, which makes up the majority of its mass, could be built entirely out of lunar dust is a big step, Freundlich says. The team’s experiment showed, for example, that the glassy re-formed regolith is smooth enough to serve as a substrate for the micrometre-thick layers of the solar cell and tough enough not to crack. Such flaws in the base of a solar cell would wreck it by bringing oppositely charged electrodes into contact with each other, causing short circuits. For future tests, they plan to work out how to make the semiconductor parts of the solar cell using silicon extracted from the regolith.
The researchers were careful to employ only techniques that would be available to them on the moon. This meant that the solar cells they produced were inefficient. While conventionally produced solar cells convert up to 20 per cent of the energy falling on them, the simulated lunar panels were only 1 per cent efficient. However, this may not matter on the moon, where real estate is virtually unlimited.
Text for this article comes from a New Scientist press release.
Lunar maria cover only 20% of the Moon’s surface, but have about have of the Moon’s Helium-3. JSC-1 was designed to emulate mare regolith, and so one might presume that these solar cells will be made on the maria. Considering helium-3’s potential use in neutronless fusion, I wonder if this valuable resource will be captured, by force of law or economics, during processing of the regolith.
The “robotic rovers” link provided by rickyjames brings up a lot of pop-up. This link brings up exactly the same story w/ fewer pop-ups: robotic rovers to build solar cells entirely out of lunar dust.
Finally, a question. Since these cells are made parallel to the surface, won’t they be useless near the lunar poles?
…and changed the link.
That should read “have about half of the Moon’s”