Speaker
Description
Lunar dust poses a critical challenge for surface missions due to its abrasiveness, electrostatic adherence and fine particulate nature. SolSys Mining will contribute to ESA’s Planetary Dust Contamination Workshop 2025 by presenting LuNOR, a European lunar simulant—available in both mare and highlands variants, with dedicated dust simulant formulations forthcoming in 2026. Produced from raw Nordic rock sources via an industrial, multi-stage process that promotes consistency, authentic particle shapes and lithological complexity, LuNOR combines fidelity with sustainability through local sourcing and optimized production. Proof-of-concept batches have already been developed under Norwegian Space Agency funding, and SolSys is currently developing methods for producing glass and composite particles for higher fidelity variants.
We hope our presentation will foster an open discussion on the topic of simulants and LuNOR, which will in turn help define the most critical simulant fidelity parameters for contamination studies, such as particle shape distributions, compositional proxies and glass content, so that our next development phases deliver a tailored European platform for dust characterization, contamination monitoring and mitigation-technology testing.
