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Moon Bricks Could Keep the Lights On and the Heat Up in Lunar Colonies

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 26 2019, @04:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the pizza-ovens dept.

"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Moon bricks could keep the lights on and the heat up in Lunar colonies – TechCrunch

There may be no “dark side” of the Moon, but when and where it is dark, it’s dark — and stays that way for two weeks. If we’re going to have colonists up there, they’ll need to stay warm and keep the lights (among other things) on for the long lunar night. Turns out bricks made of Moon dust could be part of the solution.

Of course they will use the readily available solar power during the lunar day, and you might think that they could just charge up some batteries to last them through the night. But batteries are large and heavy — not the kind of thing you want to pack for a trip to the Moon.

How else could lunar colonies store energy? The European Space Agency partnered with Azimut Space to find out whether a sort of improvised geothermal energy solution would be feasible.

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  • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday July 26 2019, @01:48PM (1 child)

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 26 2019, @01:48PM (#871459) Journal

    Or, what is the average temperature a few meters down?

    Data:

    The mean subsurface temperature at a depth of 1 m is approximately 252.4K at one probe site and 250.7K at the other. These temperatures are approximately 35K above the mean surface temperature and indicate that conductivity in the surficial layer of the Moon is highly temperature dependent. Between 1 and 1.5m, the rate of temperature increase as a function of depth is 1.75K/m (±2%) at the probe 1 site. In situ measurements indicate that the thermal conductivity of the regolith increases with depth.

    Source: "The Apollo 15 lunar heat-flow measurement" Langseth, Marcus G. et al. 1972 doi:10.1007/BF00562006 [doi.org]

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday July 26 2019, @07:31PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 26 2019, @07:31PM (#871595) Journal

    252 Kelvin == -21.15 degrees Celsius . Pretty cold, but handleable with decent insulation.

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