NASA is inviting people to send their names to the surface of the moon aboard the agency’s first robotic lunar rover, which is being managed from the space agency’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

The rover named VIPER — short for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover — will embark on a mission to the lunar South Pole to unravel the mysteries of the moon’s water and better understand the environment where NASA plans to land the first woman and first person of color under its Artemis program.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.