By Adelaide Zollinger

On March 6, MIT launched its first lunar landing mission since the Apollo era, sending three payloads — the AstroAnt, the RESOURCE 3D camera, and the HUMANS nanowafer— to the moon’s south polar region. The mission was based out of Luna, a mission control space designed by MIT Department of Architecture students and faculty in collaboration with the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, Inploration, and Simpson Gumpertz and Heger. It is installed in the MIT Media Lab ground-floor gallery and is open to the public as part of Artfinity, MIT’s Festival for the Arts. The installation allows visitors to observe payload operators at work and interact with the software used for the mission, thanks to virtual reality.

A central hub for mission operations, the control room is a structural and conceptual achievement, balancing technical challenges with a vision for an immersive experience, and the result of a multidisciplinary approach. “This will be our moon on Earth,” says Mateo Fernandez, a third-year MArch student and 2024 MAD Design Fellow, who designed and fabricated Luna in collaboration with Nebyu Haile, a PhD student in the Building Technology program in the Department of Architecture, and Simon Lesina Debiasi, a research assistant in the SMArchS Computation program and part of the Self-Assembly Lab. “The design was meant for people — for the researchers to be able to see what’s happening at all times, and for the spectators to have a 360 panoramic view of everything that’s going on,” explains Fernandez. “A key vision of the team was to create a control room that broke away from the traditional, closed-off model — one that instead invited the public to observe, ask questions, and engage with the mission,” adds Haile.