Here's how local scientists propose to power the first human outpost on another world: Launch a rover to the moon and melt its dusty soil into acres of electricity-generating solar panels. A year later, when astronauts arrive, all they have to do is plug into the grid.
HOUSTON, Texas — Here's how local scientists propose to power the first human outpost on another world: Launch a rover to the moon and melt its dusty soil into acres of electricity-generating solar panels. A year later, when astronauts arrive, all they have to do is plug into the grid.
It may sound like science fiction, but some Houston researchers believe they can turn the vision into reality. And they may well be right. A recent experiment proved the workability of the concept to use the fine, gray lunar soil, which includes silicon and every needed metal.
The scientists simulated in a vacuum chamber what their rover would have to do -- melting a sample of soil identical to that brought back from the moon by astronauts and solidifying it into a smooth sheet of glassy material that could convert light into electricity.
"This was the crucial step," said Alex Freundlich, a physicist at the University of Houston, of research published in the science journal Acta Astronautica. The research was funded by a $750,000 NASA grant.
This summer, Freundlich and his team will request an additional $10 million to $20 million from NASA to continue their work and begin building a prototype rover. If successful, the venture would remove one of the greatest barriers to a permanent space settlement: cheap and replenishable power.
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When Freundlich and his colleagues first proposed the idea four years ago, it was just a clever concept, other planetary scientists say.
"Now they've put some meat on the bones of their plan," said Patricia Reiff, director of the Rice Space Institute at Rice University. "They've made it a lot more believable as an option."
Freundlich's project also received a boost after President Bush announced last year that he would like to establish a lunar colony as a starting point for manned missions to Mars.
The current, rough timeline calls for a team of four to six people to live for a few weeks or a month at a time on the moon by 2015 or 2020, said Paul Spudis, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the President's Commission on Moon, Mars, and Beyond.
A number of robotic probes must scout and prepare a lunar site before humans live there, he said. Ideally, much of the resources needed, such as water and energy, will come from the moon itself. "This is a very intriguing idea," Spudis said of Freundlich's work. "I might say it's even likely to happen."
With current technology, a good solar cell converts about 17 percent of the light hitting it into electricity. The crude solar cells created by Freundlich were only about 1 percent efficient, but he says there should be no problem eventually creating cells that are 5 percent or even 10 percent efficient.
If powering a moon base seems ambitious, it's a mere steppingstone to an even grander goal of Freundlich and other colleagues at UH, including physicist David Criswell. The plan, originally conceived by Criswell, calls for covering much of the moon's surface with solar panels and beaming the electricity by microwave back to Earth.
About 13,000 terawatts of sunshine falls on the moon, about 100 times the amount of all the energy used on Earth. By harvesting just a fraction of that solar energy and returning it to Earth, there would be cheap and unlimited power for all.
"We're running out of power solutions on Earth," Freundlich said. "This, I think, is the best solution, and we need to go to the moon to make it happen."
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Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
