William “Red” Whittaker may not be a household name, but he should be. The robotics professor has led the development of a tiny wheeled robot called Iriswhich could become the first unmanned vehicle sent by the United States to explore the Moon.
Iris has not been built by experienced engineers from NASA or a large aerospace company, but by students at Whittaker’s home institution, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh. The robot was recently secured to its lunar lander, ahead of a scheduled launch in mid-2022.
The project represents a dream come true for the robotics pioneer, whose work has ranged from cleaning up nuclear accidents to building driverless cars. On March 28, 1979, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania experienced a partial meltdown in one of its reactors. Radioactive gases were released into the environment and the reactor building became too contaminated for people to enter.