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To the Moon to Stay: MIT Lunar Mission Launch 2025
With a launch date no earlier than February 26, 2025, three MIT research payloads aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will travel to the moon—specifically to be deployed on a Lunar Outpost MAPP rover to the moon's south pole.
This mission is a cross-MIT effort led by the Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative, with a number of collaborators, including Media Lab member companies Castrol and Comcast/Xfinity. The three payloads below involve multiple Media Lab researchers:
- AstroAnt: a miniature robotic swarm for inspections and diagnostic tasks on the external surfaces of spacecraft, rovers, and landers.
- Depth Camera / "Capturing the Moon": a modified Microsoft Azure Kinect camera (commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) time-of flight (ToF) depth camera which can provide high resolution near-field depth data).
- HUMANS project: a two-inch silicon wafer with over a thousand messages—from people's voices on the personal and larger meanings of space—etched on the record using cutting-edge MIT nanotechnology, creating a symbolic avenue for space access worldwide.