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China's Solar-Powered Printer Turns Moon Soil Into Construction Bricks

CHINA, AUG 8 – The solar-powered 3D printer creates strong bricks from lunar soil, reducing reliance on Earth materials and enabling sustainable lunar base construction, officials said.

  • At their Hefei lab, researchers unveiled a machine that uses a parabolic reflector and fibre optic bundles to 3D-print lunar bricks from regolith without Earth materials.
  • Facing Earth's intense gravity, teams struggled with the two-year development, overcoming lunar soil melting and solar transmission challenges to enable lunar construction without transport from Earth.
  • The process yields dense, robust bricks for shelters, roads and platforms as concentrated sunlight reaches over 3,000 times normal intensity, heating lunar regolith above 1,300 C.
  • To validate the process, Chinese astronauts aboard the nation's space station will expose simulated lunar bricks delivered by the Tianzhou 8 cargo spacecraft in November 2024, assessing durability for future lunar bases.
  • Next, automated robots could build lunar surface structures, using bricks as protective shells around pressurised habitat modules to shield from radiation and meteorites.
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Scientists at the Deep Space Research Laboratory in Hefei recently unveiled an innovative machine that produces bricks directly from lunar soil - without the need for additives or materials brought from Earth. The machine works by concentrating the sun's rays using a parabolic mirror and transmitting the energy in fiber-optic beams that reach temperatures of over 1,400 degrees Celsius. At these heat pressures, the lunar soil becomes a solid and …

Lunar Bricks: Solar Energy Transforms Lunar Dust Moon Race: China innovates to build with lunar dust – Urgent News... The post Lunar Bricks: Solar Energy Transforms Lunar Dust appeared first on World News.

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noticiasambientales.com broke the news in on Sunday, August 3, 2025.
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