The only lunar rover in operation is China's Yutu-2. (File)
The US was the first and only country to put humans on the moon, but NASA has been noticeably absent from the international competition to put robots there.
The USSR landed the first lunar robotic rovers in the 1970s; India tried and failed to land one in 2019. The only lunar rover in operation is China's Yutu-2, a 300-pound machine that's spent the past four years prowling almost two-thirds of a mile across the moon's far side, sending back images of rocks.
Greece, Japan and the United Arab Emirates are among those working on their own lunar rover programs.
It seems likely that NASA's robots will also be beaten by a group made up primarily of students at Carnegie Mellon University. About 300 students worked on a rover named Iris that they plan to send to the moon aboard a commercial lunar lander scheduled to launch on May 4.
Nikolai Stefanov, who was a 19-year-old physics undergraduate joined up after coming across a poster advertising the project with the motto: "There is never a second chance to be first."
Given his lack of experience, he offered to fetch coffee for the people doing the technical work. Stefanov, now 22, wound up with another job: mission control director. Once the rover lands on the moon, he'll make sure things are running smoothly.
Iris is about the size of a shoebox and weighs a little less than 4.5 pounds, which would make it the smallest and lightest rover yet to reach the moon. It's also the first to be made from carbon fiber, rather than aluminum.
Part of the reason to build such a small rover was so its creators could afford to hitch a ride on a private flight.
The company operating the landing-a CMU spinoff called Astrobotic Technology-is taking 14 payloads to the moon. CMU won't say how much Iris's ticket cost, but the whole project has come in at $800,000.
(The university has provided some of the financial backing, as have private donors, in part through a crowdfunding campaign supporting CMU's lunar projects. Each of the 900 people who contributed, many of them students, will have their name carried to the moon in a text file aboard Iris.)
As a tool of scientific observation, Iris isn't the most powerful instrument. It has just a single camera at the front and back, which will make distinguishing shadowy rocks from craters especially difficult. Iris has the advantage, though, of being low to the ground, meaning its camera could capture close-up images of moon dust.
Despite its limitations, Iris is an undeniable step forward for the private space industry. It's set to be the first rover not built by a nation-state to land on an extraterrestrial body. "We want to open up space to everybody," Stefanov says.
Success isn't guaranteed. If Iris makes it past launch and survives the vibrations of space, strong electromagnetic fields and a moon landing, it still has to deal with extreme temperatures and the challenges of navigating the moon's surface.
Iris has about 50 hours of battery life, during which time its creators hope it can capture photos and send them back to Earth. Once its batteries run out, it will remain on the moon.
The official US space program puts a greater focus on Mars than on the moon. NASA has landed five rovers on the planet, the first one in 1997.
It's planning on sending its first rover, a 1,000-pound robot named Viper, to the moon in November 2024. Viper will map the moon's resources and try to identify the location and concentration of ice.
CMU expects its students to be a fixture of lunar exploration. It's planning another student-made rover, a $5 million project called MoonRanger and funded by NASA. MoonRanger will be designed to head to the moon's south pole to look for ice, believed to be buried a yard or so beneath its crust. That might make the rover a good candidate to accompany NASA's planned water-seeking mission to the moon, which is intended to land two Americans at the lunar south pole in 2025. They'd be the first humans on the moon in more than 50 years.
Raewyn Duvall, the 28-year-old project lead for Iris, previously worked at NASA and is now a Ph.D. student at CMU. She says rovers will pave the way for humans living in outer space, a scenario she says is inevitable.
Rovers can prepare landing areas, then create human-friendly habitats by doing things such as extracting hydrogen and oxygen from lunar regolith-moon dust-for use as water, air and rocket fuel. "Robots are really the way to find the best locations and the resources where humans should be going next," Duvall says.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)