Researchers used a synthetic version of moon dust to build working solar panels, which could eventually be created within – and used to power – a moon base of the future
By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
3 April 2025
A boot print on the dusty surface of the moon
Public domain sourced / access rights from CBW / Alamy
Future lunar bases could be powered by solar cells made on-site from melted moon dust.
Building items on the moon, using materials that are already there, would be more practical than shipping them from Earth. When Felix Lang at the University of Potsdam in Germany heard about this idea, he instantly knew what to do. “It was like, ‘We have to make a solar cell like this, immediately’,” he says.
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Two years later, Lang’s team has built and tested several solar cells featuring moon dust as an ingredient. The other key component is a crystal called halide perovskite, which contains elements such as lead, bromine and iodine, alongside long molecules of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen.
The team melted a synthetic version of lunar regolith – the layer of loose rocks and dust that blankets the moon – into “moonglass”, which they then layered with the crystal to complete a solar cell. They did not purify the regolith, so the moonglass was less transparent than materials in conventional solar cells. But Lang says that the team’s best prototypes still reached about 12 per cent efficiency. More conventional perovskite solar cells typically reach efficiencies close to 26 per cent; Lang says computer simulations suggest his team could reach that number in the future.
In general, researchers agree that perovskite solar cells will outperform the more traditional silicon-based devices, both in space and on Earth. From the lunar standpoint, using perovskite materials is also attractive because they can be kept very thin, which would reduce the weight of the material to be transported to the moon. According to the team’s estimates, a solar cell with an area of 400 square metres would require only about a kilogram of perovskite. This is an impressive claim, says Ian Crawford at Birkbeck, University of London.