“Houston? Looks like we have some competition ...”
OK, it’s not exactly competition, and NASA isn’t sweating over it either, but Carnegie Mellon University is creating a “Moonshot Mission Control” command center within its Gates Center for Computer Science, where earthbound student crews will be involved in operating the Iris, MoonRanger and future space shots from a distance of nearly a quarter million miles away.
A rendering of the plannedThink of it as real world experience meets the heavens. Plus, nobody has to worry about getting used to weightlessness.
It apparently is the Pittsburgh university’s first such center and will further campus research and serve as a high-tech training space for students.
Iris is due to launch later this year, campus officials say. Students also are involved in developing the MoonRanger, set to launch in 2023.
Carnegie Mellon is no stranger to applying robotics, computer science and its other leading disciplines to build and program gizmos able to traverse the challenging lunar topography and report back on what they find. It has also designed them over the years for a plethora of other uses, from playing soccer and serving as a campus receptionist, to searching for people trapped in building collapses.
Still, for Carnegie Mellon, the center and the rovers themselves represent firsts.
Iris “will be the smallest, first American, first university-built and first student-built rover on the moon,” according to a university statement. “MoonRanger, the first rover to search for evidence of water on the lunar surface, will explore the South Pole after its scheduled flight to the moon in 2023.”
The project has been long in the making, and university officials say they are exuberant now that the control center’s construction is nearing and a launch is approaching. Iris is to lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, officials said.
"The culmination of many years and countless hours of work by hundreds of individuals has brought us to a pivotal moment in the history of the university and space exploration,” said William "Red" Whittaker, University Founders Research Professor in the Robotics Institute.
As if the point he was making needed further emphasis, he said: “Carnegie Mellon is going to the moon.’’
The control center is planned for rooms 2109 and 2111 inside the Gates Center on CMU's campus in Oakland, part of its school of computer science. The center can be modified for future CMU space missions, officials said.
As many as 10 crew members will monitor the flights and review data it sends back. Undergraduate and graduate students representing disciplines across campus are involved, including some with career aspirations in the space industry, said Lydia Schweitzer, 25, a research associate in the Robotics Institute and lead of the CMU Mission Control Center project.
Current research includes ongoing CubeSat missions, testing batteryless nanosatellites, building robots to service satellites in orbit, developing capabilities for satellite swarms and more, officials explained.
Campus officials say its control center will have operator workstations where crew members can plan and direct the movements of the rovers, monitor their data and images, and communicate with them and each other, according to university officials. Crew members will see telemetry, localization data and Fault List Evaluator for Ultimate Response (FLEUR) readouts at the workstations, they added.
Two large displays will show similar data for the whole team. The flight director will be able to control the movements of the rovers from a dedicated workstation.
A fact-sheet about the Iris, a 4-pound-plus explorer points to its significance.
“As the smallest and lightest rover ever to go to space, Iris will be the first American robot to go to and drive on the Moon,” it reads. “Iris’s shoebox sized chassis and bottle cap wheels are made from carbon fiber, attributing to its lightweight design and another first for planetary robotics.
’Along with testing small, lightweight rover mobility on the moon, Iris is collecting scientific images for geological sciences.”
Officials said MoonRanger, the first rover to search for evidence of water on the lunar surface, will explore the south pole after its scheduled flight to the moon.
Ms. Schweitzer exuded enthusiasm as she discussed the chance to be involved in such an endeavor.
“We’re not just doing this for fun. We're doing this for real,” she said. “It feels incredible.”
Bill Schackner: bschackner@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1977 and on Twitter: @Bschackner
First Published: March 31, 2022, 7:04 p.m.
Updated: April 1, 2022, 12:30 p.m.
