James Carpenter just needed some fake Moon dirt. Carpenter, a lunar-exploration expert at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, works on a drill designed to hunt for buried ice on
the Moon. His team recently ordered half a tonne of powdery material to replicate the lunar surface from a commercial supplier in the United States. But what showed up was not what the team was expecting. “The
physical properties were visibly different,” says Carpenter.