using lunar soil

...also be helpful in building other structures on the moon, including giant telescopes and solar power arrays...

To build a telescope the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, Chen suggests scaling up the recipe to about 130 pounds (60 kilograms) of epoxy and 1.3 tons, or 2,600 pounds (nearly 1,200 kg) of lunar dust.


Chen and Rabin envision creating a telescope mirror spanning 164 feet (50 meters) in diameter on the moon. Such an observatory would dwarf the largest optical telescope in the world — the 34-foot (10.4-meter) Gran Telescopio Canarias, also called the Great Telescope Canary Islands.


A monster telescope or two such telescopes working in concert on the moon could help in the search for extrasolar planets and make detailed observations of distant galaxies, Chen said.

To arrive at the concrete recipe, Chen and his Goddard colleagues including Douglas Rabin, mixed small amounts of carbon nanotubes and epoxies (glue-like materials) with simulated lunar dust, or crushed rock that has the same composition and grain size as dust on the moon.


After several iterations, one of which yielded what Chen described as "gooey and smelly," the team created a strong material with the consistency of concrete. Next, they coated the material with epoxy and spun the wet lunar concrete to form a 12-inch-wide (30-centimeter-wide) bowl-like structure shaped like a telescope mirror.


"After that, all we needed to do was coat the mirror blank with a small amount of aluminum, and voilà, we had a highly reflective telescope mirror," Rabin said. "Our method could be scaled-up on the moon, using the ubiquitous lunar dust."