On 2 March 2025, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander touched down near Mons Latreille in Mare Crisium, carrying ten NASA science and technology instruments under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. One of them was the Electrodynamic Dust Shield, developed at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. On 27 March 2025 NASA reported that the shield had used electrodynamic forces to lift lunar regolith off glass and thermal radiator surfaces on the Moon.
NASA describes lunar dust as abrasive and electrostatic. It clings to surfaces, and it threatens spacesuits, hardware and human lungs. Thermal radiators, solar panels, camera lenses and suits are all on the list of surfaces where it does damage.
A demonstration on the Moon is the end of a qualification path, not the start of one. Before hardware flies, dust mitigation concepts are designed, compared and qualified on the ground: coatings, seals, mechanisms, optics and active systems such as an electrodynamic shield. Every one of those tests needs dust.
Lunar dust is fine, electrostatically charged and abrasive, and its real behaviour can only be studied against a regolith analogue with documented mineralogical fidelity. Generic dust does not transfer.
Fidelity is not one number. Mineralogy and chemistry, particle size distribution, particle shape, and glass and agglutinate content each change how a test bed behaves. For dust work the weight moves toward size and shape, because those properties drive abrasion and seal performance. The full argument, property by property, is in How to choose a lunar regolith simulant.
A dust campaign also has to be repeatable. Results from one coating, seal or shield design can only be compared with the next when the feedstock is characterised the same way each time.
Regolithia is Strocera's Apollo-traceable lunar regolith simulant for dust mitigation research on landers, suits and lunar surface hardware. It comes in Highland (RGS-H1) and Mare (RGS-M1) variants, at phase match 96.4 % and 99.2 % against their Apollo reference soils, supplied as a sub-75 µm silicate powder. Alternative size fractions are produced on request for the test campaign.
Strocera had no part in the Blue Ghost mission or the Electrodynamic Dust Shield experiment. This note is about the ground testing that dust mitigation work relies on.
Strocera formulates alpha alumina powder, adaptive glass-ceramic and the Regolithia lunar regolith simulants to customer specification. Test-specific details are on the Lunar dust mitigation and Lunar Regolith Simulant pages.
