“Carnegie Mellon University Students Make History with America’s First Robotic Lunar Rover”

2023-04-20 01:00:00

Written by Samah Labib

Thursday, April 20, 2023 03:00 AM

After 65 years of Lunar explorationThe United States will finally put its first autonomous lunar rover, but that mission won’t be piloted by NASA engineers — it’s the brainchild of a dedicated group of college students. Students at Carnegie Mellon University are sending America’s first robotic lunar rover to the Moon in May, beating NASA by nearly a year, according to the Space.

The Iris rover was developed by students, faculty, and alumni at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania over three years and is being flown to the moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, the agency’s foray into partnering with the commercial space industry. .

Initially, it was scheduled to launch in late 2021 or early 2022, but setbacks in NASA’s lunar agenda delayed the launch until this spring.

The task is the first robotic vehicle On the moon in America, in addition to the first rover developed by college students, NASA’s VIPER spacecraft is scheduled to launch next year.

Weighing in at 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms), the Iris has a shoebox-sized hull and carbon-fiber wheels the size of bottle caps. Its 60-hour mission will be primarily a visual mission: taking pictures of the lunar surface for geographic study. It will also test new localization techniques as it It transmits data regarding its location to Earth.

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