The team created a substance designed to simulate moondust, melted it into glass and used it to build a solar cell they say could be more efficient in space than ones made from the Earth’s materials.
That’s because standard glass slowly browns in space, blocking sunlight and reducing efficiency. But moonglass has a natural brown tint from impurities in the Moon dust, which stabilises the glass, prevents it from further darkening, and makes the cells more resistant to radiation.
Making moonglass, the team found, is surprisingly simple. It doesn’t require complex purification and concentrated sunlight alone can provide the extreme temperatures needed to melt lunar regolith into glass. By tweaking the thickness of the moonglass and fine-tuning the solar cell’s composition, the team managed to achieve 10% efficiency. With clearer moonglass that lets in more light, they believe this could reach 23%.
Still, the Moon poses challenges that Earth doesn’t. Lower gravity could change how moonglass forms, the solvents currently used to process perovskite won’t work in the Moon’s vacuum and wild temperature swings could threaten the materials’ stability.
To find out if their moon dust solar cells are truly viable, the team hopes to launch a small-scale experiment to the Moon to test them out in real lunar conditions.
