Generally when a rocket explodes on pad, fails to achieve escape velocity, or otherwise does not complete its mission, it’s a failure. That’s not entirely true, however, for the world’s first nano lunar rover, even though it did not successfully reach the moon’s surface.
Early this year Iris was launched on Peregrin Mission One to explore the moon. Ultimately the mission failed, but there were still some successes.
So what can we learn from what was intended to be the first American-made lunar rover to land on the moon since 1972? Apparently plenty, according to three Carnegie Mellon students who helped build and launch it.
“In terms of the largest technological achievement I think we accomplished was firstly just the fact that the primary systems during launch and transit survived extreme temperatures, high radiation, specifically through the Van Allen belt,” says Kevin Fan, a former CMU student who worked on the project, on the TechFirst podcast. “We verified that all the systems were operational and for a nano rover of this size, that is quite an accomplishment.”
By nano, he means seriously small.
The Iris Lunar Rover, built by a team of 300 Carnegie Mellon students, is about the size of a shoebox. It weighs 2.2 kilograms, or under five pounds, and it would have been not only the first university-developed lunar rover and the first rover with a carbon fiber chassis and the first American rover since the Apollo days, it would have been the first American robotic rover.
“Our mission was to be ultra low cost and carbon fiber being a strong material which could withstand all of the conditions that you just spoke about … that was one of our reasons to make it of carbon fiber,” says Harshvardhan Chunawala, a member of that team. “It takes off weight which ultimately reduces the overall cost of the launch.”
The 300-strong student team put hundreds of thousands of hours of development into Iris, and only an unfortunate propellant leak on the lander prevented the mission from continuing its mission to the moon, landing on the lunar surface and exploring.
Interestingly, however, the team was still able to communicate with Iris, transmitting data, running commands and getting responses back while it was in a highly eccentric earth orbit.
One reason why: Iris wasn’t actually inside the lunar lander vehicle: it was bolted to the outside. That means that the team was able to verify that onboard systems were on and functioning well in hard vacuum, exposed to the solar wind as well as cosmic rays. Survival wasn’t a given, because many of the components were not radiation-hardened: they were off-the-shelf components that were cheap and available for a student-led team.
That’s important, because future exploration of the moon relies on many small and cheap robotic rovers checking many places.
That will help open up space for exploration and maybe even settlement, Iris team member Carmyn Talento says.
“I see moon bases in the near future,” Talento says. “I see Mars bases in the near future, and I like to think of those as like your gas stations. In some cases they might be, if we are able to develop that technology, if we’re able to use the resources on these, other planetary bodies and once you get to that little step away from earth, whether that’s the moon, whether that’s Mars, you start opening up more accessible areas of our solar system and of space.”
All the lessons learned will likely pay dividends in the future, says Talento, who continues to work on additional rovers, including one called Moon Ranger that is intended to search for lunar ice.
