With a return to the Moon—this time with long-term habitation in mind—American space officials are turning their attention to one of the crucial challenges facing lunar operations: achieving an orderly and precise touchdown amidst a developed lunar infrastructure.
The immense power required to land and launch from the Moon generates forceful engine plumes that stir up clouds of dust and debris, posing a serious risk to surrounding equipment. During the Apollo era, when landings were brief and in uninhabited areas, these concerns were less pressing. But with current plans calling for permanent infrastructure, understanding the physics of these debris swirls has become essential to ensuring safe and sustainable lunar activity.
Engineering for the Lunar Surface
Rui Ni of Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering is leading a collaborative research effort with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of Michigan, which has been ongoing since 2021. The team is investigating a phenomenon first observed during the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s—an unusual pattern of regularly spaced dust streaks radiating from a lander’s touchdown point. This distinctive pattern also appeared in data from Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander, and for decades, scientists were unable to explain it.
The engineers revealed their findings in a new paper, finally describing the fluid dynamics responsible for the pattern. Ni’s team’s findings demonstrate how the vacuum environment found on the lunar surface produces the effect under conditions far different from those on Earth. Dust particles within these lander-generated debris clouds exhibited amplified physical behaviors due to the vacuum.
Danger to Moon Bases
“We set out to understand the unusual patterns observed during lunar landings and discovered that these distinctive patterns are the result of the Görtler instability, a fluid dynamics phenomenon where the curved flow of exhaust gases over the moon’s surface creates forces that generate rotating vortices, leading to the characteristic patterns we see in the dust clouds,” Ni said. “More broadly, we’re exploring how particles are eroded and mobilized during extraterrestrial landings.”
The severity of the dust ejecta problem is compounded by the reliance on artificial habitation for humans to survive on the Moon. In the lunar environment, humans will need to reside inside fabricated habitats, likely powered by solar panels and serviced by additional infrastructure. The dust torrents resulting from lander jets can be as damaging as a sandblaster, capable of wreaking havoc on necessary equipment.
Understanding exactly how those dust jets will behave is essential to engineering safe landings for both the vehicle involved and surrounding infrastructure.
Studying the Phenomenon
To better understand the effect, Ni’s team recreated lunar landing conditions inside a 15-foot vacuum chamber at the Marshall Space Flight Center. A six-camera system captured the response of simulated lunar soil to a directed gas jet, allowing the team to track particle trajectories, measure velocities, and observe crater formation. This marks the first time such an experiment has been conducted, producing entirely new data on lunar surface interactions.
“We discovered that the strikingly regular streak patterns seen during landings aren’t caused by the chosen landing sites,” Ni said. “Instead, they result from the behavior of the supersonic rocket plume as it imprints on the granular surface. This effect is extremely pronounced on the moon due to its near-vacuum environment.”
After a half-century absence, NASA is once again planning to send humans to the Moon under the Artemis initiative. This time, the mission aims to establish permanent structures on the lunar surface.
“Our work helps identify the risks, offers ways to mitigate the risks, and improves predictions of erosion rates during landings,” he said. “Our findings pave the way for future missions to optimize landing strategies and mitigate dust cloud effects on equipment and visibility.”
The paper “Dusty Streaks on the Moon: Fingerprints of Multiphase Flow Instabilities” appeared on July 19, 2025, in Nature Communications.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.