The First U.S. Lunar Rover is Headed to the Moon (and Students Made It!)
On May 4, a Pennsylvania university will send the first U.S. rover to the Moon.
The rover, named Iris, is record-breakingly small and lightweight, and was developed entirely by students from Carnegie Mellon University.
The launch will also send a project called MoonArk to the lunar surface, billed as the first museum on the Moon.
The U.S. has had quite a presence on the Moon throughout history. We landed the first person on its surface, staked the first flag, brought back samples, and we’re headed back in just a few years. But strangely, there’s one thing the United States has never done.
We’ve never sent a rover to the Moon. We’ve sent what’s called a lunar roving vehicle, which astronauts drove around the surface. But never just a rover.
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.
On May 4, students from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pennsylvania will be sending their rover into space. It’s called Iris, and it will ride to the lunar surface on the Peregrine lander powered by a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket. The lander will also contain 13 other projects from various groups.
The rover is designed to be small and lightweight, and breaks a few records in the process of becoming the first U.S. rover on the Moon. It will be the smallest and lightest rover—coming in at just 2 kilograms—and the first rover developed entirely by students. It’s also the first rover to have both carbon fiber chassis and wheels.
"Hundreds of students have poured thousands of hours into Iris. We've worked for years toward this mission, and to have a launch date on the calendar is an exciting step," Raewyn Duvall, CMU graduate student and commander of the Iris mission, said in a press release. "Iris will open up lunar and space exploration by proving that a tiny, lightweight rover built by students can succeed on the moon."
Once the rover has landed, it will conduct a short mission—only about two and a half days long. It will spend those two and a half days driving around, gathering images to be used in future geological science, and collecting ultra-wideband radio frequency data to be used in developing new relative localization techniques. The whole mission will be controlled and constantly monitored by students from the university.
"In space, what matters is what flies,” William "Red" Whittaker, research professor and planetary robotics specialist, said in a news release, “and soon you'll see irrefutable proof that what Carnegie Mellon has accomplished in planetary exploration matters a great deal."
The little landmark rover will also be traveling alongside another first. A company called Astrobiotic— a group founded by Whittaker that also designed the Peregrine lander—will be sending a project called MoonArk to the lunar surface, which has been in development for 10 years.
MoonArk is billed as the first museum on the Moon, and consists of a small metal-and-gemstone cylinder with several internal compartments. Those compartments contain art, small objects, and samples from Earth to be discovered by future lunar explorers.
“The whole spirit of the project is about cooperation and humans being creative and moving forward together," Mark Baskinger, associate professor at CMU and director of the MoonArk project, said in a press release. "It is aspirational to send a sculptural object to the moon, but it's also very a hopeful piece. We hope and expect that future humans will see that quality in us.”
Between Iris and MoonArk, we’ll have a lot of reasons to look to the sky next month.
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