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Iris has not been built by experienced engineers at Nasa or a large aerospace company, but by students at Whittaker's home institution of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh. The robot was recently secured to its lunar lander, ahead of a launch scheduled for 2022.
While the public has grown used to seeing rovers on Mars, NASA plans for 2022 to be the year of a U.S. return to the surface of the moon by two robotic landers and tiny rovers.
Peregrine Mission 1 will carry scientific and other payloads to the Moon including the Iris rover, the first American and student-developed rover to land on the Moon.
At four pounds, it's "a huge, huge thing to be able to make a something so small," program manager and Ph.D. student Raewyn Duvall says of the rover, which will travel with spacecraft from Pittsburgh tech company Astrobotic.
The tiny rover passed a huge milestone on Wednesday, Dec. 1, when it was secured to one of the payload decks of Astrobotic's Peregrine Lunar Lander, which will deliver it to the moon next year.
A tiny lunar rover destined to go to the moon next year will have a short but important mission: laying the groundwork for other robots to build a colony in space.
Developed by Carnegie Mellon University, the ultralight, composites-intensive Iris nano-rover will make its lunar debut later this year.
Next year, as part of NASA's lunar delivery orchestrated by the Pennsylvania-based company Astrobotic, the agency will launch a small rover to begin that revolution. That rover is called Iris and is the first of a new, small and simple design called CubeRovers to hearken back to cubesats.
A former intern at NASA stepped up in a leading role and created a small robotic explorer destined to land on the Moon, according to a blog post from NASA.
Some Pittsburgh rovers are gearing up to take big steps for mankind.Carnegie Mellon University researchers are developing what could be the first American robotic rover to explore the moon’s surface.
"We are moving forward…we’re going to the moon," a triumphant project manager, Raewyn Duvall, told Iris team members during a Zoom meeting following the review.
Carnegie Mellon University is one step closer to operating its robotic rover on the surface of the Moon: The school’s diminutive bot has passed a crucial NASA design review, performed by the agency in collaboration with Astrobotic, whose Peregrine lunar lander will be providing the ride for the robot down to the surface of the Moon on a mission set for 2021.