![]() ![]() If everything works, Peregrine Mission One will be sent to the Gruithuisen Domes region in the moon’s northern hemisphere by a new rocket called Vulcan Centaur, which is under development by the U.S.-based United Launch Alliance. Iris is one of more than a dozen scientific payloads carried by the Peregrine lunar lander, built by Astrobotic Technology, a Pittsburgh-based company spun off from the university. ![]() at Carnegie Mellon while developing Iris, and she has stayed as a research associate to see the project through. ![]() “There were no constraints-just come in at 2 kilograms or less!” laughs Raewyn Duvall, the program manager for the Iris rover. Mission managers estimate that 300 students have spent the equivalent of a century in work-hours on the rover since it began in 2017. But one lesson it teaches is that there’s no such thing as a small moon project. Iris is tiny by space-rover standards-it’s about the size of a shoebox, with four wheels each about the size of a small pizza. The rover is called Iris, and it’s largely the work of students at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. Now, 50 years later, the United States is making up for lost time-but if plans hold up, its first remote-controlled rover won’t be sent by NASA, or SpaceX, or some other large space agency or company. Only the Soviet and Chinese governments have. But in those rushed years to be first, the United States never sent a robotic rover, a good way to look at the lunar landscape close up. The last three Apollo missions included lunar rovers driven by the astronauts. Before NASA sent the first astronauts to the moon in 1969, it sent robotic scouts to crash into the lunar surface, land on it, and map it from orbit. The United States skipped a step in the space race. ![]()
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