Carnegie Mellon Robot, Art Project To Land on Moon in 2021

CMU becomes space-faring university with payloads aboard Astrobotic lander. Carnegie Mellon University is going to the moon, sending a robotic rover and an intricately designed arts package that will land in July 2021. The four-wheeled robot is being developed by a CMU team led by William "Red" Whittaker, professor in the Robotics Institute. Equipped with video cameras, it will be one of the first American rovers to explore the moon's surface. Although NASA landed the first humans on the moon almost 50 years ago, the U.S. space agency has never launched a robotic lunar rover. The arts package, called MoonArk , is the creation of Lowry Burgess, space artist and professor emeritus in the CMU School of Art. The eight-ounce MoonArk has four elaborate chambers that contain hundreds of images, poems, music, nano-objects, mechanisms and earthly samples intertwined through complex narratives that blur the boundaries between worlds seen and unseen.