Dust Mitigation Roadmap

As humans return to the Moon and set their sites on Mars with spacesuits, rovers, habitats, and other assets during the Artemis missions, the lunar and Martian regolith (i.e. dust) covering the surface will be an environmental and performance challenge to nominal and contingency operations. Accounts from Apollo astronauts and analysis of hardware returned from the surface illustrate just how deleterious the dust can be. During Apollo missions, the lunar dust adhered to the spacesuits mechanically and electrostatically, and the rovers experienced mechanical malfunctions. It is anticipated that during Artemis, with longer and more complicated lunar surface missions, off-nominal effects due to lunar dust contamination will increase exponentially, underscoring the need for dust mitigation technology development and characterization efforts.