Historical

Facilities that can no longer be booked under the name on their page. Every measurement is kept: the conditions a result was taken under are what a later reader needs in order to use it. What is gone is the ability to run something new, so nothing here is to be planned around. The three entries cover different kinds of loss: a particle accelerator whose configuration was retired, an Army laboratory that was merged out of existence, and a vacuum chamber whose status cannot be confirmed.

Retired accelerator: Michigan State NSCL

The Michigan State University National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory ran its final experiment in May 2022, and the coupled K500 and K1200 configuration no longer exists [1]. The facility mattered to spacecraft electronics because single event effects (SEE) testing needs ions that penetrate a part without removing its lid. The high-energy SEE Test Facility was commissioned and characterized in 2004 [2], and an orbiter avionics handbook of 1999 already recorded NSCL as newly available for heavy ion testing without delidding [3]. A 2021 NASA radiation hardness assurance guideline described NSCL as undergoing upgrades [4].

The test practice that NSCL served predates it. A galactic cosmic ray strike was first tied to a satellite anomaly in 1975 [5], and JPL wrote down its heavy ion upset testing method in 1984, before any standard existed [6]. Other facilities fill parts of the same role: the JPL Radiation Effects Group operates cobalt-60 irradiators for total dose work [7], and the RADEF facility at the University of Jyvaskyla raised its extracted beam currents in 2007 [8]. NASA has since argued that deeply penetrating high energy beams are the alternative to depackaging stacked die and integrated packages [9], and a guideline for system on a chip devices replaces per-structure testing with whole-device methods [10]. Screening of commercial parts for a JPL interplanetary payload found latchup in some of them [11].

Heavy ion SEE work at Michigan State continues at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, whose Single Event Effects Facility and K500 Chip Testing Facility are named as the successors to the NSCL work [12]. The K500 Chip Testing Facility ribbon cutting was held on 19 February 2026 [13]. Neither of those two sources was retrieved as a document.

Merged laboratory: Waterways Experiment Station

The US Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station ceased to exist as a named organization on 30 September 1999 [14]. Vehicle mobility work continues at the same Vicksburg site under the Engineer Research and Development Center, where the Mobility Systems Branch descends from the WES Mobility and Environmental Division [15].

The surviving record is a body of reports. The theory the work rested on was criticized in 1968 for its two founding equations, the Bekker pressure-sinkage and shear stress-displacement relations [16], and the WES school of dimensional analysis had earlier collected the published wheel-on-soft-soil data [17]. For the Apollo lunar roving vehicle, WES compared five candidate wheels in fine sand across a range of soil strengths [18], tested six wire-mesh configurations in lunar soil simulant [19], and ran single-wheel dynamometer tests on the flight-configuration Boeing wheel [20]. A retrospective built from designer interviews traces how the wire mesh wheel was arrived at [21]. Its procedural descendant is the drawbar pull standard used for planetary rover testing at NASA Glenn [22]. A 2025 NASA consolidation of mobility test practice, written with the Lunar Terrain Vehicle as the case study, carries that drawbar method forward and lists as an open gap whether matching lunar soil strength by cone index under terrestrial gravity is valid [39]. The Apollo-era single-wheel dynamometer and soil bins are documented only in reports from 1968 [16] to 1978 [23]. The 1978 report concerns tractor-dozer blades on coal-mine spoil, not lunar hardware, and shows the range of work the station carried out.

Unconfirmed chamber: NASA Glenn Lunar Dust Adhesion Bell Jar

The NASA GRC Lunar Dust Adhesion Bell Jar has no established status. Glenn’s own index of its facilities does not list it [24], but that index omits facilities known to be running, so it settles nothing. The chamber’s design is documented as a lunar simulation with stated successes and failures against each environmental requirement [25], and its thermal measurement method is described separately [26]. Its last documented use here is a 2011 evaluation of brushing for thermal control surfaces, in which brushes that cleared most dust in ambient air restored only about half the pristine alpha over epsilon of AZ93 paint under simulated lunar conditions [27].

The work the chamber supported belongs to a wider set of dust studies. The force budget for dust adhesion was set out in 2007 [28], the problems Apollo crews recorded were sorted into categories [29], and simulant standardization followed a 2005 workshop [30]. Standardized ASTM testing of six simulants in 2025 found that simulants matching the lunar particle size distribution still differ substantially in shear strength and compressibility, so a result taken in one simulant does not transfer by grain size alone [40]. Effects on rover thermal control are synthesized in [31]. Mitigation options include ion-beam surface modification [32], electrodynamic dust shields [33], spacesuit-integrated shields with coatings [34], ceramic coatings [35] and the abrasion tests used to rank them [36]. Charging and lofting theory is reviewed in [37]. The earlier Apollo-era dust test, a full-scale wheel and fender run in a vacuum chamber on an aircraft flying a one-sixth g profile, is the flight-analog predecessor to all of these [38].

What is not established

The corpus holds no further curated sources about retired facilities. The closure dates rest on a program history page [1] and a library catalog record [14], neither of which describes the facility itself. The current operating status of the Lunar Dust Adhesion Bell Jar is unresolved. The FRIB heavy-ion page [12] and the K500 release [13] were curated from the citing claims, not from the retrieved documents. Whether any SEE test capacity equal to the NSCL energy range now exists at FRIB is not stated by the sources held.