Abstract: Decades of research and development have been invested in various forms of railguns, coilguns and mass drivers. See http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of Contents1.html Research at the Space Studies Institute in the 1980s refined the mass driver concept. See http://ssi.org/introduction-to-research/research-report/# mass-driver-iii The innovation of the Electromagnetic Regolith Excavator is to eliminate the use of a bucket or other container that is accelerated by the magnetic fields. Instead, magnetic particles in the regolith itself (nickel-iron grains and/or magnetite) are put into motion and they carry along with them a to-be-determined fraction (perhaps all) of the co-resident non-magnetic regolith particles. The Electromagnetic Regolith Excavator applies only attractive forces: no anchoring is required. This enables robotic and crewed spacecraft to safely collect surface material from asteroid targets that may be tumbling.