Nuisance Moon Dust Could Power Space Exploration

Troublesome lunar dust could soon be transformed into solar cells to help power moon bases and humanity's push to explore further out into space.

This is the promise of an international team of researchers, who say that fabricating solar panels directly on the moon, rather than shipping them from Earth, would be significantly more efficient in the long-run.

Dust on the moon has traditionally been seen as a problem—it being both electrostatic (so it clings to anything with a charge) and abrasive, thereby having the potential to damage everything from lunar hardware and spacesuits to human lungs.

In fact, NASA recently reported developing a "dust shield" that can repel this lunar dirt from coated surfaces. Perhaps, however, collecting this dust might be the next step.

"From extracting water for fuel to building houses with lunar bricks, scientists have been finding ways to use moon dust," said paper author and physicist Felix Lang of the University of Potsdam, Germany, in a statement.

"Now, we can turn it into solar cells too, possibly providing the energy a future city will need."

Reliable and sustainable sources of energy will be essential for expanding humanity's presence on the moon, not to mention for exploring deeper into space.

While solar power has promise, its application on the moon and beyond comes with inherent logistical problems.

"The solar cells used in space now are amazing, reaching efficiencies of 30 percent to even 40 percent, but that efficiency comes with a price," said Lang.

"They are very expensive and relatively heavy because they use glass or thick foil as cover. It's hard to justify lifting all these cells into space."

In fact, the researchers say, replacing terrestrial glass with glass made on the moon and from the loose regolith readily available on the lunar surface could slash the transport costs of setting up solar panels on the moon by some 99 percent.

In their study, the researchers took a simulated moon dust and melted it into a substance dubbed "moonglass," which they then paired with a mineral known as perovskite to create a new kind of solar cell.

Producing the moonglass is a straightforward process, they report, with the temperatures needed to melt lunar regolith being achievable with concentrated sunlight alone.

The team found that—when blasted with space-grade radiation—the moonglass-made solar cells outperformed their conventional counterparts.

When considered in terms of the mass of material one would need to transport into space, the moonglass panels produce 100 times more energy than normal, Earth-built ones.

"If you cut the weight by 99 percent, you don't need ultra-efficient 30 percent solar cells—you just make more of them on the moon," said Lang.

So far—by tweaking the thickness of the moonglass and the composition of the solar cells—the team have been able to make solar cells that are 10 percent efficient. With clearer moonglass, the team are hoping to get this figure up to 23 percent.

"Plus, our cells are more stable against radiation, while the others would degrade over time," Lang explained.

Standard glass has the unfortunate habit of slowly turning brown in space, which makes it increasingly opaque to sunlight and less efficient when used as part of a solar panel.

In contrast, impurities in lunar dust give moonglass a slight tiny from the start—which stabilizes the material, preventing further darkening and also making the cells resistant to damaging radiation.

Despite this, there are still a number of potential hurdles to overcome before the moonglass solar panels could be fabricated on the moon.

Firstly, the team explained, the lower gravity on the lunar surface (which is only about a sixth of what we experience here on the surface of Earth) could potentially change how moonglass forms—while the solvents used to process perovskite don't work in a vacuum.

Furthermore, the extreme temperature fluctuations seen on the moon (from some 250 degrees Fahrenheit in the day down to -208 degrees Fahrenheit at night) may affect the stability of the new solar panels.

Only further experiments will be able to show whether the moonglass concept is viable in practice—with the team hoping to send a small-scale experiment to the moon to test the panels out in real lunar conditions.

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Reference

Cuervo-Ortiz, J. M., Palomares, J. C. G., Ozen, S., Härtel, M., Sarisozen, S., Dittwald, A., Kourkafas, G., Castro-Méndez, A.-F., Peña-Camargo, F., Seid, B. A., Bundesman, J., Denker, A., Neitzert, H.-C., Neher, D., Stoll, E., Linke, S., & Lang, F. (2025). Moon photovoltaics utilizing lunar regolith and halide perovskites. Device. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.device.2025.100747