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MIT’s To the Moon to Stay Program Aims to, Well, Go to the Moon to Stay

MIT’s To the Moon to Stay program reimagines humanity’s return to the Moon. Its payloads will be deployed on a Lunar Outpost MAPP rover to the Lunar south polar region. The MAPP rover is carried by an Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander, which in turn rides aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Learn more  about the To the Moon to Stay program.

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Aeronautics Aerospace Aviation

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 We're going back to the moon to stay because really humanitywants to go to the moon. It's a great demonstration of working really closely with industry. (bright music) MIT has had such fundamentalimpactful contributions to all of space explorationand particularly the moon. (bright music) The first contract NASA evergave for the Apollo program,

    00:00:24 it was to MIT, and we provided the guidancenavigation and control. This really is a whole of MIT initiative. Maria Zuber bringing her and her students and expertise on board asmany missions to the moon. It's a really big opportunityfor MIT to come together as a university, return tothe surface of the moon. So it's a historic opportunityto land to the South Pole and also get this reallyinnovative camera technology and robotic ant technology

    00:00:54 nearby the future crewedlanding missions for NASA. NASA essentially has a taxi to the moon. It's called the CLPS program. This essentially allowed us to directly charter the payloadspace to get to the moon, and what that has enabled is that the students directlyhave this opportunity to build and deploy their own payloads. (bright music continues) The Space ExplorationInitiative is a group of faculty

    00:01:19 and staff and studentsall working together to build the prototypes forour sci-fi space future. So not just thinking about the technology for our future in space,but also the culture and how we're going tolive and thrive in space. So MIT has three payloadsthat will be going to the lunar surface. This 3D camera is really exciting because it not only takes color images, but it also uses LiDAR.

    00:01:43 What that means is we canactually see a 3D color picture of something that's on the lunar surface. The AstroAnt is a tiny robot and be working on theoutside surface of spacecraft and build an on-bodysensor network for them, and the AstroAnt robot can move around on the outside surface and take data from different positions, and we can use the data to help with monitoring the performanceof the mother spacecraft.

    00:02:09 We took inspiration from "Seveneves," the space sci-fi book, to say, how can we take this veryversatile little robot and turn it into somethingthat could survive in space, that crawls over large spacecraft like space stations inorbit, or in our case now, a rover on the surface of the moon? Even a few years ago, it seemed from a littlebit science fictiony that we might really betraveling to other planet.

    00:02:33 But look how much has changed. And so it's incredibly important that we send messages out into space, to the moon and elsewhere, that represent what life here on Earth is. I am incredibly excited to be able to involve all of these different people in this lunar mission. I think that it's sucha great way for people to see why the moon is exciting,why we wanna go back there,

    00:02:56 and what it actually feels like to be able to send something there and be a part of something so exciting. (bright music continues)