Three MIT payloads will soon hitch a ride to the moon in a step toward establishing a permanent base on the lunar surface.
In the coming days, weather permitting, MIT engineers and scientists will send three payloads into space, on a course set for the moon's south polar region. Scientists believe this area, with its permanently shadowed regions, could host hidden reservoirs of frozen water, which could serve to sustain future lunar settlements and fuel missions beyond the moon.
NASA plans to send astronauts to the moon's south pole in 2027 as part of the Artemis III mission, which will be the first time humans touch down on the lunar surface since the Apollo era and the first time any human sets foot on its polar region. In advance of that journey, the MIT payloads will provide data about the area that can help prepare Artemis astronauts for navigating the frozen terrain.
The payloads include two novel technologies - a small depth-mapping camera and a thumb-sized mini-rover - along with a wafer-thin "record," etched with the voices of people from around the world speaking in their native languages. All three payloads will be carried by a larger, suitcase-sized rover built by the space contractor Lunar Outpost.
As the main rover drives around the moon's surface, exploring the polar terrain, the MIT camera, mounted on the front of the rover, will take the first ever 3D images of the lunar landscape captured from the surface of the Moon using time of flight technology. These images will beam back to Earth, where they can be used to train Artemis astronauts in visual simulations of the polar terrain and can be incorporated into advanced spacesuits with synthetic vision helmets.
Meanwhile, the mini-rover, dubbed "AstroAnt," will wheel around the roof of the main rover and take temperature readings to monitor the larger vehicle's operation. If it's successful, AstroAnt could work as part of a team of miniature helper bots, performing essential tasks in future missions, such as clearing dust from solar panels and checking for cracks in lunar habitats and infrastructure.
All three MIT payloads, along with the Lunar Outpost rover, will launch to the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and touch down in the moon's south polar region in a lander built by space company Intuitive Machines. The mission as a whole, which includes a variety of other payloads in addition to MIT's, is named IM-2, for Intuitive Machines' second trip to the moon. IM-2 aims to identify the presence and amount of water-ice on the moon's south pole, using a combination of instruments, including an ice drill mounted to the lander, and a robotic "hopper" that will bounce along the surface to search for water in hard-to-reach regions.
The lunar landing, which engineers anticipate will be around noon on March 6, will mark the first time MIT has set active technology on the moon's surface since the Apollo era, when MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, now the independent Draper Laboratory, provided the landmark Apollo Guidance Computer that navigated astronauts to the moon and back.
MIT engineers see their part in the new mission, which they've named " To the Moon to Stay ," as the first of many on the way to establishing a permanent presence on the lunar surface.
"Our goal is not just to visit the moon but to build a thriving ecosystem that supports humanity's expansion into space," says Dava Newman, Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT, director of the MIT Media Lab, and former NASA deputy administrator.
Institute's roots
MIT's part in the lunar mission is led by the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), a research collaborative within the Media Lab that aims to enable a "sci-fi future" of space exploration. The SEI, which was founded in 2016 by media arts and sciences alumna Ariel Ekblaw SM '17, PhD '20, develops, tests, and deploys futuristic space-grade technologies that are intended to help humans establish sustainable settlements in space.
In the spring of 2021, SEI and MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) offered a course, MAS.839/16.893 (Operating in the Lunar Environment), that tasked teams of students to design payloads that meet certain objectives related to NASA's Artemis missions to the moon. The class was taught by Ekblaw and AeroAstro's Jeffrey Hoffman, MIT professor of the practice and former NASA astronaut, who helped students test their payload designs in the field, including in remote regions of Norway that resemble the moon's barren landscape, and in parabolic flights that mimic the moon's weak gravity.
Out of that class, Ekblaw and Hoffman chose to further develop two payload designs: a laser-based 3D camera system and the AstroAnt - a tiny, autonomous inspection robot. Both designs grew out of prior work. AstroAnt was originally a side project as part of Ekblaw's PhD, based on work originally developed by Artem Dementyev in the Media Lab's Responsive Environments group, while the 3D camera was a PhD focus for AeroAstro alumna Cody Paige '23, who helped develop and test the camera design and implement VR/XR technology with Newman, in collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center.
As both designs were fine-tuned, Ekblaw raised funds and established a contract with Lunar Outpost (co-founded by MIT AeroAstro alumnus Forrest Meyen SM '13, PhD '17) to pair the payloads with the company's moon-bound rover. SEI Mission Integrator Sean Auffinger oversaw integration and test efforts, together with Lunar Outpost, to support these payloads for operation in a novel, extreme environment.
"This mission has deep MIT roots," says Ekblaw, who is the principal investigator for the MIT arm of the IM-2 mission, and a visiting scientist at the Media Lab. "This will be historic in that we've never landed technology or a rover in this area of the lunar south pole. It's a really hard place to land - there are big boulders, and deep dust. So, it's a bold attempt."
Systems on
The site of the IM-2 landing is Mons Mouton Plateau - a flat-topped mountain at the moon's south pole that lies just north of Shackleton Crater, which is a potential landing site for NASA's Artemis astronauts. After the Intuitive Machines lander touches down, it will effectively open its garage door and let Lunar Outpost's rover drive out to explore the polar landscape. Once the rover acclimates to its surroundings, it will begin to activate its instruments, including MIT's 3D camera.
"It will be the first time we're using this specific imaging technology on the lunar surface," notes Paige, who is the current SEI director.
The camera, which will be mounted on the front of the main rover, is designed to shine laser light onto a surface and measure the time it takes for the light to bounce back to the camera. This "time-of-flight" is a measurement of distance, which can also be translated into surface topography, such as the depth of individual craters and crevices.
"Because we're using a laser light, we can look without using sunlight," Paige explains. "And we don't know exactly what we'll find. Some of the things we're looking for are centimeter-sized holes, in areas that are permanently shadowed or frozen, that might contain water-ice. Those are the kinds of landscapes we're really excited to see."
Paige expects that the camera will send images back to Earth in next-day data packets, which the MIT science team will process and analyze as the rover traverses the terrain.
As the camera maps the moon's surface, AstroAnt - which is smaller and lighter than an airpod case - will deploy from a tiny garage atop the main rover's roof. The AstroAnt will drive around on magnetic wheels that allow it to stick to the rover's surface without falling off. To the AstroAnt's undercarriage, Ekblaw and her team, led by Media Lab graduate student Fangzheng Liu, fixed a thermopile - a small sensor that takes measurements of the main rover's temperature, which can be used to monitor the vehicle's thermal performance.
"If we can test this one AstroAnt on the moon, then we imagine having these really capable, roving swarms that can help astronauts do autonomous repair, inspection, diagnostics, and servicing," Ekblaw says. "In the future, we could put little windshield wipers on them to help clear dust from solar panels, or put a pounding bar on them to induce tiny vibrations to detect defects in a habitat. There's a lot of potential once we get to swarm scale."
Eyes on the moon
The third MIT payload that will be affixed to the main rover is dubbed the Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space, or HUMANS project . Led by MIT AeroAstro alumna Maya Nasr '18, SM '21, PhD '23, HUMANS is a 2-inch disc made from a silicon wafer engraved with nanometer-scale etchings using technology provided by MIT.nano. The engravings are inspired by The Golden Record, a phonograph record that was sent into space with NASA's Voyager probes in 1977. The HUMANS record is engraved with recordings of people from around the world, speaking in their native languages about what space exploration and humanity mean to them.
"We are carrying the hopes, dreams, and stories of people from all backgrounds," Nasr says. "(It's a) powerful reminder that space is not the privilege of a few, but the shared legacy of all."
The MIT Media Lab plans to display the March 6 landing on a screen in the building's atrium for the public to watch in real-time. Researchers from MIT's Department of Architecture, led by Associate Professor Skylar Tibbits, have also built a lunar mission control room - a circular, architectural space where the engineers will monitor and control the mission's payloads. If all goes well, the MIT team see the mission as the first step toward putting permanent boots on the surface of the moon, and even beyond.
"Our return to the Moon is not just about advancing technology - it's about inspiring the next generation of explorers who are alive today and will travel to the moon in their lifetime," Ekblaw says. "This historic mission for MIT brings students, staff and faculty together from across the Institute on a foundational mission that will support a future sustainable lunar settlement."
