Deep in the Arizona desert, a bizarre machine is offering new hope to sufferers from conditions ranging from eczema to cancer. How does it work? By the light of the silvery moon

Late one afternoon this February, I set off from Tucson, Arizona, to spend a night beneath the moon. It was rush hour and I found myself joining the stream of commuters on their way home from this sprawling town, the second largest in the state. Gradually the traffic thinned out until after 30 miles I myself peeled off, beckoned by a sign pointing down a dirt road to the right. Ten minutes later, dust billowing in my wake, I pulled up at my destination, a huge mirror nestling in the Sonoran desert.

The Interstellar Light Collector to give the contraption its full name sat half-submerged in a crater. It was dusk now and everything glowed pink so that the Collector, in truth an array of 84 separate mirrors, looked as if it had emerged from the red desert landscape. I'd arrived early and was wandering around the 25-ton, six-storey-high device when a man appeared from a nearby marquee pushing a patio heater on a trolley. He waved at me and headed to the far side of the crater where a trailer customised to house yet another mirror the size of a large satellite dish stood.

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