Moon dust may help astronauts power sustainable lunar cities. Here’s how.

Moon dust is quickly becoming a magic material, from which oxygen and other elements such as titanium can be extracted, that can be compacted down to form bricks to construct lunar shelters, or “lunarcrete” to bind those bricks. And now, scientists have shown how lunar regolith can be turned into solar cells.

“From extracting water for fuel to building houses with lunar bricks, scientists have been finding ways to use moon dust,” Felix Lang, of the University of Potsdam in Germany, said in a statement. “Now, we can turn it into solar cells, too, possibly providing the energy a future moon city will need.”

Traditional solar cells incorporate Earth-manufactured glass, which can be relatively heavy, increasing launch costs. Manufacturing solar cells on the moon from local materials is therefore an attractive proposition.

To test the idea, Lang led a team who experimented with a lunar dust simulant. Samples of material from the moon are in short supply and precious to scientists. Therefore there’s a cottage industry, spearheaded by NASA’s Simulant Development Laboratory, which creates different types of simulated lunar regolith. (Regolith is the technical term for the material that sits on the surface of the moon, comprised of dust and fragments of impact ejecta).