This year, the X Prize Foundation is pointing its magic wand squarely at the Moon. The Peter Diamandis-led group announced the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize today, a competition for privately funded robotic lunar exploration. The foundation hopes that this largest-ever X Prize purse will see the development of multiple new, low-cost methods of robotic space exploration, as well as begin capitalizing on the moon’s potential as “a source of solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on Earth—energy independence and climate change.”
Competitors will need to land a robotic rover on the Moon that is capable of, among other things, roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to the Earth.
The purse has multiple tiers, including a $20 million grand prize, a $5 million second prize and $5 million in bonus prizes. To win the grand prize, a team must rove on the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters and transmit a specific set of video, images and data back to the Earth. Second prize involves simply landing, roving, and transmitting data, without the specific parameters of the grand prize. The bonus prizes will award roving longer distances (more than 5,000 meters), imaging manmade artifacts (e.g. Apollo hardware), discovering water ice, and/or surviving through a frigid lunar night (approximately 14.5 Earth days). Deadlines: December 31, 2012 for the grand prize and December 31, 2014 for the Second Prize.
Of course, since the competition is sponsored by Google, the participating lunar spacecraft will be equipped with high-definition video and still cameras that will transmit live to the Google Lunar X Prize Web site.
Since Google Earth debuted its new Sky function, which allows users to flip their viewpoints and focus on the heavens from any point on the planet, a few weeks ago, astronomers have already taken to the project.
A UC Berekely professor used it in his introductory astronomy class at the start of school, and scientists have added details about extrasolar planets, gamma ray bursts, and supernovae. Now users can get real-time updates on these dramatic celestial events captured by the SWIFT observatory and Sloan Digital Sky Survey, among others, every 15 minutes.
Nothing inspires like looking up at the stars on a clear night, but a new feature from Google Earth could come close. In fact, the experience it offers is much closer to how many professional astronomers study the sky on a daily basis – not through a lens, but on a computer screen.
The newest version of Google Earth, the free program that has been downloaded by an estimated 250 million people, includes a “Sky” function that allows you to switch the view from any point on the planet so that you’re looking up and out instead of down at the ground. It works just like Google Earth, except now you can zoom in on stars, galaxies and planets. You won’t be looking at a live view; the images are compiled from shots taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Find out more, or download it yourself, here.
