The new era of planetary exploration, and especially of the potential utilisation of the Lunar surface that requires establishing habitats and installing instruments, revealed again the already well-known problem of the Lunar dust and its effect to astronauts and to technological materials. Lunar dust is an ultra-fine-scale material resulting from the solar and galactic radiation and micro-meteorite impacts that convert the regolith mineral materials into angular, sharp fragments that usually follow crystallographic surfaces like cleavage, into microsphere melts, and into aggregates (agglutinates). The sizes are defined to be below about 60 micrometers, reaching nanograin sizes with diameters that are around 10 nanometers. Most importantly is that they are highly charged and reactive; both properties are due to the fresh surfaces induced by the micro-impacts and strong electromagnetic radiation that form Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) on their surfaces. The case for Mars is similar, with the additional restriction that dusts with ROS immediately damage organic biosignatures in environment with little humidity, significantly affecting sample return missions that investigate life's signatures.

In both cases, high-fidelity dust simulants are required to test all possible processes that affect technological materials, i.e., degradation due to mechanical abrasion or biotoxicity from hydroxyl radicals. We investigate the properties that Lunar and Martian dust simulants must have in order to characterise them as high-fidelity. These simulants match the properties of the planetary regoliths, allowing high precision test materials after their exposure to highly charged and chemically activated dusts. This endeavour is extremely significant implications to materials and tools testing during a mission to the Moon and of the resilience of structures and instruments. It is also a way to measure biotoxicity of dusts when they come into contact with humidity or the human body.