Though the space sector has had some challenges of late—with the 8th Starship launch and second Intuitive Machines lunar landing attempt having mixed success at best—it’s easy to forget Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, “Ghost Riders In the Sky”, and its landing on the Moon last week and has been successfully performing its scientific work with its various payloads.
One payload, the Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) payload, has a significant Canadian contribution from Markham Ontario’s Integrity Testing Laboratory Inc. (ITL). SpaceQ reached out to ITL president and CEO Jacob Kleiman about RAC, and he provided details their contribution.
RAC and regolith
The RAC is focused on one key problem: regolith dust. While the moon and its regolith surface may seem rocky and static, it’s actually covered in a large amount of fine dust that can (and does) get disturbed and swirl up beneath, around, and above objects on the lunar surface.
Worse yet, Kleiman said, the dust is “very sticky and aggressive”. Regolith dust tends to stick to everything; it’s highly electrically charged due to constant bombardment by solar and cosmic particles, and the lack of water or air to abrade the dust means that the particles are also extremely “spiky” on a microscopic level. Between those sticky, spiky particles and “other environmental factors, like vacuum, temperature extremes, solar radiation, [and] ultraviolet irradiation”, materials on the Moon can become damaged incredibly quickly.
Hence the need for RAC. As NASA’s site on RAC explained, the goal is to use the payload’s Moon-exposed wheels to “expose 15 sample materials – fabrics, paint coatings, optical systems, sensors, solar cells, and more – to the lunar environment to determine how tenaciously the lunar dust sticks to each one.”
Kleiman elaborated slightly, saying that RAC “consist[s] of two cylindrical wheels, each with 15 sample surfaces”. one will be exposed during the entire mission, while the other is to “remain stowed until science operations begin on the lunar surface, post-landing.”
The instruments, NASA said, will measure “accumulation rates during landing and subsequent routine lander operations”, in order to best understand which materials can either repel or shed the spiky sticky dust.
ITL and dust repulsion
Two of those test material surfaces—one per wheel—will be from ITL. Based out of a 8.500 sq.ft. facility, ITL creates and tests a variety of materials related to space and spaceflight. They have a list of project collaborators that includes (among others) the Canadian Space Agency, who provided funding for this technology development, NASA, the European Space Agency, MDA Space, Canadensys, and L3Harris. For the purposes of this experiment, however, the focus is on their materials that reduce or eliminate charges on objects in space.
This isn’t new ground for ITL. They already have two charge-dissipating processes called Carbosurf and Carbo+ that, Kleiman said, “eliminate charges accumulating on satellite antennas in GEO orbits and other hardware, without compromising their low RF (radio frequency) transmission properties”. Dealing with static-charge problems, much like the ones that help make lunar dust sticky, is a key focus for the company—making their anti-static materials a natural addition to the RAC testing wheels.
ITL also hosts a series of international conferences on “protection of materials and structures from the Low Earth Orbit Space Environment”, Kleiman said, with the next scheduled for June 2026 in France. Kleiman said that the moon topic has also become “a natural shift in interest” in their conferences, and the lunar topic has become part of their call for papers.
ITL’s research into lunar dust adherence
ITL has been studying the issue of lunar dust adherence in detail for years, with Kleiman collaborating with others to publish a 2023 scholarly article on the issue and on the RAC experiment.
Their article is dense, revealing the extensive terrestrial testing that ITL has done in their facilities using simulant (simulated regolith) to determine which surfaces are most affected by regolith dust, and what methods are best used to either repel or remove the dust.
They found that the adhesion “depend[s] on the surface morphology and roughness”, all of which “significantly influenced the dust accumulation and retention.” In particular, ITL’s terrestrial research suggested that retention levels increased as you went from glasses to polymer films to paints, and that “despite silicate inorganic paints being radiation and temperature resistant and highly efficient in space applications”, they may not be well suited for long-term lunar duty. They called the paint issue “a serious unsolved problem.”
That said, the paper also said that current passive approaches may not be enough in general. Their research showed that active approaches (like shaking, tapping, ultrasonic vibration or a blast of inert gas) are still often required to remove the regolith dust from current surfaces. Better passive protection may be necessary.
Testing a “diamond like coating” on Blue Ghost
With that in mind, ITL is using the RAC platform for testing a new solution. Kleiman told SpaceQ that they’re testing “a so-called diamond-like-coating (DLC) that is a hard, scratch- and wear-resistant, variable transparency thin coating with charge dissipative properties”, one deposited using ion beams. Their belief is that it will “provide protection from the very abrasive regolith and will prevent its accumulation on such surfaces.”
While he couldn’t get into too much detail on the material beyond that, Kleiman told SpaceQ that the coating “represent a wide range of structures, properties of which can be changed by changing the deposition conditions and by doping them with different elements.” this can include, he said, “adjust[ing] the work function (WF) of the DLC to match the WF of the regolith”, which “will also aid in the mitigation process”.
In the exchange with SpaceQ, Kleiman said that “our preliminary results of exposure of materials, treated with this process, to regolith simulants had shown that, indeed, the simulant adhesion to the treated surface is reduced.” In the published article, however, Kleiman et al also advocated combining coatings like this with active measures, a combination described in the paper as “Multifunctional Dust Mitigation Technology (MDMT)”.
Kleiman said that “we hope that our participation in the RAC Payload experiment will allow us to better understand the behavior of materials on the Moon, and to develop better dust mitigation technologies for their protection, leading to better materials and their protection in short- and long-term space missions.”
According to Firefly’s Mission Updates, the RAC experiment is already complete, and now Blue Ghost is shutting its systems down to endure the hot lunar noon where temperatures can get up 250°F (121°C). ITL will soon, with luck, have their dust-repelling answers.
