Lunar Colony To Run On Moon Dust

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zavvy

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<b>Lunar Colony To Run On Moon Dust</b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />SIMULATED moon dust has been used to make a key component of a working solar cell, giving an unexpected boost to President George W. Bush's project of setting up a colony on the moon.<br />Bush's plan, announced a year ago, envisages a permanent lunar base from which people can go out and explore the moon, and then go on to Mars. "We will need a power source," says David Williams, a planetary and lunar scientist at NASA's National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Bringing stuff up from Earth is really expensive." <br /><br />Four years ago, Alex Freundlich and his colleagues at the University of Houston in Texas came up with the idea of getting robotic rovers to build solar cells entirely out of lunar dust or "regolith"(New Scientist, 24 June 2000, p 14) . This fine, grey powder is half silicon dioxide, with the remainder made up of a blend of oxides of 12 metals, including aluminium, magnesium and iron. The team reasoned that this mix contains all the elements necessary to build a solar panel, and suggested that robots trundling over the lunar surface could melt regolith, refine it and then lay down a glassy substrate on which solar cells could be deposited. The rover- solar-powered of course- would leave a trail of solar panels in its wake.<br /><br />Now Freundlich and his team have shown that a key part of this plan should work. They simulated what the rovers will do inside a vacuum chamber, which they used to get as close as possible to the moon's near-perfect vacuum. They melted a powder called JSC-1, which has a composition identical to the samples of regolith brought back by the Apollo astronauts, and then let it resolidify as a smooth, glassy sheet. <br /><br />The researchers then showed that a solar cell deposited on the surface of this sheet by thermal evaporation converts light into electri
 
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nexium

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I wonder if they tested them at the -250 degrees f of the 2 week long luner night. Perhaps we can build a rover that will build 1% conversion solar panels on south and SW faceing cliffs here on Earth. Steep cliffs are cheap real estate here on Earth, even when the nearby flat land is very costly. Neil
 
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