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.