After 65 years of lunar exploration, the United States is finally about to place its first autonomous rover on the moon. But this mission won’t be led by NASA engineers instead, it’s the brainchild of a dedicated group of college students.
The Iris Rover was developed by students, faculty and alumni at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania over the course of three years. It is being carried to the moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, the agency’s foray into partnership with the commercial space industry. The launch was originally scheduled for late 2021 or early 2022, but setbacks in NASA’s lunar agenda pushed the launch to this spring.
The mission marks America’s first lunar rover (NASA’s Viper rover is scheduled for launch next year) as well as the first rover developed by university students. Weighing in at 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms), the rover has a chassis the size of a shoebox and its carbon fiber wheels are the size of bottle caps. Its 60-hour mission will be primarily visual: taking pictures of the lunar surface for geographic study. It will also test new localization techniques in transmitting data about its position back to Earth.
In addition to Iris, the Carnegie Mellon team plans to send along an art installation called MoonArk, a small time capsule filled with poems, music, pictures and small objects. The project is meant to convey a story “that reaches people now, but also 1,000 years down the road,” Dylan Vitone (opens in new tab), associate professor at Carnegie Mellon and director of MoonArk, said in a statement. A second, identical ark is currently on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
The MoonArk and its small rover companion will launch into space aboard United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket and be brought down to the lunar surface by Pittsburgh space company Astrobiotic’s Peregrine lander. The launch is currently scheduled for May 4 which the internet has aptly dubbed International Star Wars Day from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
“Hundreds of students have poured thousands of hours into Iris,” Raewyn Duvall, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and mission commander, said in a statement. “We’ve been working on this mission for years and to have a launch date on the calendar is an exciting step.”
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