By Adelaide Zollinger

On March 6, in one of the first U.S. lunar landings since the Apollo era, MIT sent three payloads — the AstroAnt, the RESOURCE 3D camera, and the HUMANS nanowafer — to the moon’s south polar region. The MIT component of the mission was based out of Luna, a 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. Luna is installed in the MIT Media Lab ground-floor gallery and opened 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.

While the lunar mission ended prematurely, the team says it achieved success in the design and construction of a control room embodying MIT’s design approach and capacity to explore new technologies while maintaining simplicity. 

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.