Lunar regolith simulant

In the run-up to the Apollo program, crushed terrestrial rocks were first used to simulate the anticipated soils that astronauts would encounter on the lunar surface.

[2] In some cases the properties of these early simulants were substantially different from actual lunar soil, and the issues associated with the pervasive, fine-grained, sharp dust grains on the Moon came as a surprise.

Returned Apollo and Luna samples were used as reference materials in order to target specific properties such as elemental chemistry or particle size distribution.

Many of these simulants were criticized by prominent lunar scientist Larry Taylor for a lack of quality control and wasted money on features like nanophase iron that had no documented purpose.

An 8-ton sand box of commercial JSC-1A is available for daily rental from the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI).

Multiple companies have tried to sell regolith simulants for profit, including Zybek Advanced Products, ORBITEC, and Deep Space Industries.

[13] Indian Space Research Organisation has developed its own lunar highland soil simulant called LSS-ISAC1 for its Chandrayaan programme.

A 1 kg jar of JSC-1A lunar simulant
Approximately 15 g of JSC-1A
NASA Researchers view a demonstration of the moon dust simulator in the 8- by 6-Foot Supersonic Wind Tunnel facility at the NASA Lewis Research Center (1960).
Geopolymers from lunar (JSC-1A) and Martian ( JSC MARS-1A ) dust simulants produced at the University of Birmingham [ 8 ]