JAKARTA - The space company Blue Origin has secretly found a way to make solar panels on the Moon in need of only material already available on the surface of the Earth's natural satellite.
The technology is dubbed the Blue Alchemist, and has the potential to provide direct benefits to Earth as well. Last week, in a blog post that was not even promoted by the company's Twitter account or news release, Blue Origin was working on the project.
The solar cells and the power transmission cable can function from lunar soil simulations, materials chemically and mineralally equivalent to lunar regoliths.
Based on a process known as liquid regolith electrolysis, electric currents are directly channeled to simulated regolits at high temperatures, above 1,600 degrees Celsius.
Through these electrolysis processes, iron, silicon, and aluminum can be extracted from lunar regoliths. Blue Origin said it had produced silicon with a purity of more than 99.999 percent through liquid regolith electrolysis.
The main advances made by Blue Alchemist are engineers and scientists have taken side products from these reactions, with those materials alone to make solar cells and protective glass covers that allow them to last a decade or more on the lunar surface.
The billionaire Jeff Bezos-owned company will try to market the technology to NASA targeting the Artemis program to return humans to the Moon in a sustainable manner.
NASA and its international partners are currently working on developing the Artemis program to build infrastructure such as a power system so that it can stay longer on the Moon.
"Although our vision is technically ambitious, our technology is real now. Blue Origin's goal of producing solar power is only to use lunar resources in line with NASA's highest priority Moon-to-Mars infrastructure development goals," Blue Origin said in a blog post. official, quoted from ArsTechnica, Tuesday, February 14.
Of course, this is an important research breakthrough, as the same electrolysis process can also be used to produce metals to build habitats and other structures, as well as oxygen.
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