Scientists and engineers test an instrument suite in development for NASA's Artemis III mission in a “sandbox” of simulated Moon "soil."

On Sept. 9 and 10, scientists and engineers tested NASA’s LEMS (Lunar Environment Monitoring Station) instrument suite in a “sandbox” of simulated Moon regolith at the Florida Space Institute’s Exolith Lab at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Lunar regolith is a dusty, soil-like material that coats the Moon’s surface, and researchers wanted to observe how the material would interact with LEMS’s hardware, which is being developed to fly to the Moon with Artemis III astronauts in late 2026.