To replicate Earth’s living conditions on the Moon, astronauts will need novel solutions to keep their colonies powered and safe. Scientists have expressed interest in producing solar panels on the Moon’s dusty surface. They appear to have struck gold now.
Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ company, quietly announced that its “Blue Alchemist” programme had been working on the same project for about two years. The company claims to have created solar cells and electricity transmission wires from simulated lunar soil.
Creating solar cells for human colonies on the Moon
This simulated soil is similar to regolith, which is abundant on the Moon. Blue Origin’s “molten regolith electrolysis” process may have just changed the way solar cells are manufactured. Direct electric current is applied to the simulated regolith at a high temperature (over 1,600° Celsius) in this process. In theory, this method would allow researchers to extract aluminium, iron, and silicon from lunar regolith. Through this process, the space company claims to have produced silicon with a purity of more than 99.999%.
But that is only the tip of the iceberg. The main benefit of Blue Alchemist is that scientists chose the byproducts of this reaction to create solar cells and a protective glass cover that would allow the cells to survive on the Moon for 10 years or longer.
“Although our vision is technically ambitious, our technology is now real,” the company stated in a blog post. Blue Origin will now market this technology to NASA for possible use in its Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to the Moon. Blue Origin’s goal of producing solar power using only lunar resources is consistent with NASA’s top priority Moon-to-Mars infrastructure development goal.”
This advancement represents a giant step towards establishing power generation mechanisms on the Moon and, by extension, other space bodies.
