Why more and more space tech companies are in a rush to make solar cells out of fake Moon dirt

It may sound absurd to think that Moon soil might be used to create solar cells that could power a long-term human colony, but two businesses claim to have made significant advancements in that direction. They each claim to have already produced solar cells using phoney Moon material. Blue Origin, a firm owned by Jeff Bezos, claims to have been producing solar cells in this manner since 2021, but it just announced this in a blog post on Friday. Separately, Lunar Resources has also been doing the same for the past few years. Lunar Resources seeks to create technology for the “large-scale industrialisation of Space."

Each business still has a long way to go before they can create solar cells from synthetic dirt in labs on Earth and do the same on the hard surface of the Moon. But this has been a long-standing dream. If these technologies are successful, it would be feasible to establish outposts on the Moon. Dust turned into solar cells thanks to ISRU In-situ resource utilisation, or ISRU in technical parlance, is the concept of using the Moon’s resources to support human settlements, and it has just lately emerged from science fiction. Now, with its Artemis program, NASA is looking to establish “the first long-term presence on the Moon.” “They used to make fun of ISRU ten years ago, but five years ago they stopped, and now they’re actually saying, ‘This is essential. Alex Ignatiev, chief technical officer for Lunar Resources and emeritus professor of physics at the University of Houston, declares, “We have to do it. Ignatiev claims that 15 years ago, he suggested to NASA the concept of producing solar cells using elements found on the Moon. He claims that the project’s finance finally ran out.   Since then, Ignatiev has had greater success advancing the concept in the business world. With financing from NASA, the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation, Lunar Resources began operations four years ago. One man’s trash… However, he claims that the inspiration for the idea originated from NASA’s studies on the extraction of oxygen from lunar regolith. Metals and other precious materials that are produced as a byproduct of that process can be used to create solar cells, according to Ignatiev. The metals from which you extracted the oxygen were the waste products. And that didn’t seem like a waste to me.   The “dirt” covering the Moon is not at all like the soil on Earth. Since the Moon has no atmosphere, micrometeorites are continually falling on its surface. Lunar regolith, a type of dirt-like debris that is abundant in metals and silicon, which is essential for solar cells, is the consequence of that hammering. ‘Trash’ is valuable and rare Ignatiev explains that by using a procedure known as molten regolith electrolysis, it is possible to transform that trash into valuables. Lunar regolith is melted at extremely high temperatures and then shot through with an electrical current to extract iron, silicon, and aluminium.   This isolates the oxygen as well. This produces the basic ingredients for making solar cells. Stitch those cells together and you then have a solar panel, and you can hypothetically keep scaling up from there. But coming from a business that doesn’t appear to have tested its technology on actual lunar soil, it’s a lot of big talk. Regolith just doesn’t exist in sufficient quantities on Earth to be distributed to any commercial space enterprise attempting to conduct regolith studies.   To support those experiments, a whole cottage industry manufacturing regolith simulants has emerged. Even faux lunar mud is available online. Blue Origin claims that it has created its own regolith replicas that are “chemically and mineralogically comparable” to the genuine thing, however, lunar regolith’s makeup differs from one area of the Moon to another. Finding a technique to produce the high temperatures required to dissolve the regolith will be another real-world difficulty. Reactors are required by both Blue Origin and Lunar Resources to achieve temperatures greater than 1,500 degrees Celsius. Right, you have to send the equipment to the Moon. Ignatiev declares. Our reactor is not a tiny thing. One tonne, or around 1,000 kilogrammes, of it. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.