A dusty plasma device recently described in the literature has been utilized to study experimentally the charging of dust grains by the surrounding plasma. By varying the ratio d/&lgr;D between the intergrain distance and the plasma Debye length, the effects predicted by Goertz and Ip (1984), and subsequently reanalyzed in a more general fashion by Whipple et al. (1985), when ''isolated'' dust grains become ''closely packed'' grains have been demonstrated experimentally. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1993