By Elizabeth Gamillo

After becoming the first commercial operator to land a spacecraft on the Moon last month, Intuitive Machines is preparing its follow-up mission, IM-2, for launch later this year. Aboard the craft will be several NASA payloads, including a drill and mass spectrometer that will study the lunar South Pole region. There will also be a rover called the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP), built by Colorado company Lunar Outpost.

But three other projects from the MIT Media Lab will catch a ride to the Moon, too.

The MIT Media Lab is famous for interdisciplinary approach to technology, melding technology and human culture — and the projects that its Space Exploration Initiative has built for IM-2 reflect that. Upon landing, a sci-fi inspired helper robot will crawl around the rover, checking its temperature. A camera mounted to the MAPP rover will take the first digital 3-D images of the Moon’s surface. And the Media Lab has also prepared a successor to Voyager 1’s Golden Record, which carried recordings of sounds from Earth; this smaller silicon version will bring a symbolic record of people’s thoughts about space exploration to the Moon.

“We work with students who are scientists, researchers, engineers, artists, musicians — kind of across the board, thinking more about bringing all of humanity and culture and everything into space so that it’s somewhere we want to live, and think about how we can bring those technologies back to Earth and benefit from them,” says Cody Paige, director of the Space Exploration Initiative.