I have to admit that I have been lax in my moon-dust studies. But for anyone who wants the CliffsNotes version:

The dozen Apollo astronauts who landed on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 found moondust to be an unexpected challenge. Not only was it so abrasive that it wore partially through the outer gloves of their space suits, but also it stuck to everything. The more they tried to brush it away, the more it worked its way into the space suits’ fabric.

Part of the dust’s tenacious clinging was due to the sharp, irregular shapes of individual dust grains, formed by millions of years of meteorite impacts that repeatedly melted rocks into glass and then broke the glassy rocks into powdered glass. The particles’ jagged edges were almost like claws that hooked into things like microscopic burrs.

But another reason was the dust’s electrostatic charge. On the Moon, harsh, unshielded ultraviolet rays from the Sun have enough energy to kick electrons out of the upper layers of the regolith (soil), giving the surface of each dust particle a net positive charge. The smaller the particles, the less their mass and the greater their charged surface area, so the more they clung—just like Styrofoam peanuts broken into small bits.

It seems that Martian dust exhibits the same icky properties. But now that NASA has a fix on the cause, they can work on ways to keep the goo off visors and out of tech vents, making exploration at the very least less opaque.