A gaggle of students from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh traveled to Florida last month during their winter break.
The students, many of them studying to be engineers and scientists, went there to watch a rocket launch that would send a small 4.8-pound robotic rover that they had helped build on its journey to the moon. Afterward, they hoped to have time for some sun and fun, renting a large house just three blocks from the beach.
Their trip did not go as planned.
“We never saw the beach,” said Nikolai Stefanov, a senior studying physics and computer science.
The rover, named Iris, headed toward the moon on schedule in a perfect inaugural flight of Vulcan, a brand-new rocket. But the spacecraft carrying the rover malfunctioned soon after launch, and the students turned their rental house into a makeshift mission control as they improvised how to get the most out of the rover’s doomed journey.
“We had a mission,” said Connor Colombo, the chief engineer for Iris. “It wasn’t the mission we thought. And in fact, maybe that made it more interesting because we had to do a lot of thinking on our feet, and I’m really grateful to have had that.”
The Vulcan rocket, built by United Launch Alliance, lifted off on Jan 8. Aboard this rocket was Peregrine, a commercial lunar lander built by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh. It was the first American spacecraft launched in more than 50 years with the aim of gently setting down on the surface of the moon.
And aboard Peregrine was Iris, about the size of a shoe box and designed and built by the Carnegie Mellon students. It was one of the payloads on this robotic mission; Astrobotic’s main customer was NASA, which was sending several experiments as part of the preparations for sending astronauts back to the moon in the coming years.
For the students, the trip to Florida was supposed to be an entertaining lull during winter break to celebrate that Iris, after years of effort and waiting, was finally heading into space.
“We had filled our itinerary for the trip with other fun things,” said Carmyn Talento, a senior who served as the representation team lead for the Iris mission.
Iris started in 2018 as an undergraduate class of Red Whittaker, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon. He gave the students an assignment: Put a tiny rover on the moon.
Dr. Whittaker was one of the founders of Astrobotic a decade earlier as a competitor in the Google Lunar X Prize, which offered $20 million for the first privately financed venture to put a spacecraft on the moon. None of the competitors even got to the launchpad before the competition ended in 2018.
Astrobotic is now one of several companies that believe there will be profits in providing a delivery service to the moon. (Another of those companies, Intuitive Machines of Houston, is aiming to launch its spacecraft to the moon next week.) Dr. Whittaker saw that these commercial ventures offered the possibility of cheap lunar missions like the one he asked his students to come up with.
Although Dr. Whittaker is no longer directly involved with Astrobotic, he talked with company officials about the size, weight and constraints of what could fit on Peregrine. That made the rover a real-life engineering problem for his class.
“I actually knew the height above the ground for the attachment and hence the release and how far it would have to float to the ground,” Dr. Whittaker said. “And so it would be possible to compute the energy of impact and the dynamics that would relate to either landing in a stable position or tipping if it hit the wrong rock.”
Successive classes of students devised and revised the design, then built and tested the rover. Other students also joined in, training to work in mission control or taking on other tasks.
After a succession of delays, the Vulcan rocket finally made it to the launchpad in January.
Some of the Carnegie Mellon students flew to Florida. Others traveled via van, driving…
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