All Seven CMU Colleges Send Iris to Space

Student engineers, computer scientists, statisticians and entrepreneurs - and a clarinet player and a mermaid - joined together to send a Carnegie Mellon University rover to the moon. Over the life of the Iris project, hundreds of students from all seven of CMU's colleges joined the interdisciplinary effort to make Iris the first American and student-developed lunar rover. On Jan. Iris left the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida as part of the payload of the Peregrine lunar lander, built by CMU-spinout Astrobotic, aboard United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket. While a propulsion anomaly with the lander will ultimately prevent the Perergine and Iris from landing on the moon, it was an incredible learning experience for the students. "As a child, I always dreamed of becoming an astronaut," said Kevin Fang, a senior majoring in business administration in the Tepper School of Business with an additional major in computer science from the School of Computer Science. "This project reignites that childhood spark of working on a project that will be recorded in history books." Fang joined the Iris team after spending time working on MoonRanger, an autonomous rover that will search for buried ice at the moon's South Pole.