April 26, 2005 — By Eric Berger, Houston Chronicle
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.
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
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