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Students at Carnegie Mellon University, led by a 28-year-old ex-NASA pro turned PhD student, have crafted the nimble Iris rover. Iris is setting its sights on moondust close-ups, but by challenging industry norms with limited resources, the project's success could turbocharge independent space research.
The United States' first robotic lunar rover was built by Carnegie Mellon students.
Now, the first lunar rover is almost ready to launch. But it’s not being sent up by NASA. The whole project—from design to construction to eventual off-world mission—is being run by college students.
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.
It seems likely that NASA’s robots will also be beaten by a group made up primarily of students at Carnegie Mellon University. About 300 students worked on a rover named Iris that they plan to send to the moon aboard a commercial lunar lander scheduled to launch on May 4.
Iris is tiny and weighs 2 kgs (4.4 lbs)—but the design is deliberately small. The rover will fly on a private rocket carrying 14 payloads to the moon, which includes Iris, projects for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as some humans. The project involved around 300 students, who will also control and operate Moonshot Mission Control, the control center for Iris based in CMU’s campus in Pittsburgh.
Iris, a rover developed by a team of CMU students, is expected to be attached to the Peregrine. Weighing only 4 pounds, Iris will go down in history as the first American and student-developed rover to land on the moon in addition to being the smallest and lightest rover.
Also on board is a rover the size of a microwave oven built and designed by students from nearby Carnegie Mellon University. All of this has at once put Astrobotic—and Pittsburgh—very much on the cosmic map.
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.