* Astronomy

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RE: Google Lunar X Prize

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Google Prize to Honour Sacred Lunar Sites

Half a dozen Apollo lunar module descent stages and flags, three battery-powered rovers, a hand-pulled cart, several experiments, backpacks and overshoes, food packages, urine bags and other unwanted detritus dot the most hostile landscape ever visited by our species. All played their part in humanity's greatest adventure...and all may still be at risk from the exploits of future explorers.
The risk was reduced by Thursday's announcement that the Google Lunar X Prize will accommodate NASA guidelines to protect all six Apollo sites from destruction. In recent years, there has been much international interest in studying the Moon, to say nothing of the Prize itself, which is currently soliciting proposals from 26 teams to land and operate a privately funded rover on the surface by December 2015. Although NASA's guidelines are not mandatory, they exist to help mission planners to properly preserve the legacy of the past and enable the exploration of the future.
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BARCELONA MOON TEAM rover BCNRV.10 Testing

Due to the fact that our strategy is to develop a low cost mission, a different approach had to be taken. We reduced the number of wheels from 6 to 4. Also a big effort was made to compact the rover in order to avoid the need to fold elements. We simplified the mechanical designs.
The outcome of this process of simplification is a 4 wheel rover which is much simpler and robust. This simplicity defines directly the cost of the vehicle and also the ever important variable: the weight. At the moment several versions of 4 wheeled rovers have been constructed and are being tested and refined by our engineers.

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It was billed as the beginning of a "new era" of private companies racing to reach the moon, timed seamlessly to coincide with the end of NASA's 30-year shuttle program and toasted with champagne, violinists, moon-shaped biscuits and even a song. But what was supposed to be the first public flight test of a commercially developed robotic lunar lander - an entrant to the Google Lunar X Prize - ended last night with a good dose of sod's law and more fizz than bang.
The flight test of the $40 million lander - developed by the one-year-old Silicon Valley based start-up, Moon Express, and scheduled for demonstration in front of a crowd of luminaries, investors, and journalists - was called off at the last minute after engineers couldn't fix a problem with a new gyroscope. It meant the lander was convinced it was spinning in the opposite direction to the one it was actually turning. The expectant audience had to make do instead with video footage of the lander being privately tested last month.
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The final line-up of teams competing for the $30 million (£18.5m) robotic Moon-explorer prize has been confirmed.
The prize will go to the builders of the first robot to send back video as it travels over 500 metres of the Moon's surface.
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Three young scientists hope to succeed in their own private version of the Apollo program.

If Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub succeed and send a robot to the moon, they'll donate their millions in prize money to promote science among Israel youth. Yesterday the trio announced their participation in the Google Lunar X Prize competition - an effort to send an unmanned vehicle to the moon and beam back high-quality photos and short films.
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Three Google Lunar X PRIZE Competitors Awarded NASA Contracts

Today, NASA announced that it purchased data related to innovative lunar missions from three private firms. All three contracts, valued at $500,000 each, were awarded to teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE: Astrobotic Technology Inc of Pittsburgh, PA; Moon Express Inc. of Mountain View, CA; and the Rocket City Space Pioneers (through their team member Dynetics Inc.) of Hunstville, AL. The contracts mark the first of several through NASAs $30 million Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data project, managed by the Johnson Space Center near Houston, TX.
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Team FREDNET

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Google Lunar X Prize