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.
