Not NASA, this university’s students will send the first American lunar rover to the Moon on May 4
Iris will be the “first American lunar rover, the first student-developed rover, the smallest and lightest rover, and the first with both a carbon fiber chassis and wheels”.
Come May 4, Carnegie Mellon University students will launch a tiny, lightweight rover called Iris, and MoonArk, a “collaborative sculpture project” led by faculty, students, and alumni, to the Moon, before NASA.
You heard it right. While the space agency has sent five robotic rovers to Mars, it has stayed away from placing any on the Moon for the longest time. However, NASA has begun work on its lunar rover VIPER and is preparing for a lunar landing date of November 10, 2024.
Currently, China’s Yutu-2 robot has been roaming across the Moon’s far side, documenting lunar rocks. Greece, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates are working on their lunar rover programs, Bloomberg reported.
Around 300 students have worked on Iris, which will be sent aboard the Peregrine lunar lander on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket.
“We’ve worked for years toward this mission, and to have a launch date on the calendar is an exciting step,” Raewyn Duvall, commander of the Iris mission, said in a statement. “Iris will open up lunar and space exploration by proving that a tiny, lightweight rover built by students can succeed on the moon,” Duvall said.
Carnegie Mellon will also send a first-of-its-kind museum to the Moon
The rocket will be launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for its monthlong flight to the Moon. Once deployed, Iris will conduct a 60-hour mission which comprises taking photos and sending them back to Earth.
According to the release, Iris will be “the first American lunar rover, the first student-developed rover, the smallest and lightest rover, and the first with both a carbon fiber chassis and wheels”.
“In space, what matters is what flies, and soon you’ll see irrefutable proof that what Carnegie Mellon has accomplished in planetary exploration matters a great deal,” said William “Red” Whittaker, the Founders University Research Professor in the Robotics Institute and a planetary robotics pioneer.
Iris will be controlled and monitored by Carnegie Mellon Mission Control on the university’s Pittsburgh campus. Students on the Iris team have conducted mission simulations for weeks; they will work in shifts to monitor the rover during its mission and control the robot during various situations.
In addition to sending a rover to the Moon before NASA, Carnegie Mellon University will also be the first to send a museum on the Moon – the MoonArk project. It consists of chambers made of titanium, platinum, and sapphire that contain hundreds of images, poems, music, nano-objects, mechanisms, and samples from Earth.
MoonArk contains the work of 18 universities and organizations, 60 team members, and more than 250 contributing artists, designers, educators, scientists, engineers, choreographers, poets, writers, and musicians, the release noted.
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