A prize of up to $30 million for the first privately funded robotic rover to land on the Moon is being offered by the X Prize Foundation and Google. Teams from around the world have until December 2014 to soft-land a rover on the Moon and rove for a minimum of 500m, sending back imagery and data.
Space Exploration Technologies is offering competing teams reduced-cost launches on its Falcon booster and the Allen Telescope Array operated by the SETI Institute will provide downlink communications at no cost.
The Google Lunar X Prize is a follow-on to the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private suborbital spaceflight, won in 2004 by the SpaceShipOne developed by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites and backed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen.
Here's a youtube Google Lunar X Prize video promoting the contest:
X Prize chairman Peter Diamandis believes the lunar rover contest "will help develop new robotic and virtual presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration".
The purse is divided into a $20 million grand prize, $5 million second prize and $5 million in bonus prizes. To win the grand prize, a team must soft-land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, rove the surface for a minimum of 500m and transmit a specific set of video, images and data back to Earth.
To win second prize, a team must land their spacecraft on the Moon, rove and send back data.
Bonus prizes will be won by accomplishing additonal tasks such as roving beyond 5,000m, imaging made-made objects like Apollo hardware, discovering water, or surviving through a frigid lunar night.
The grand prize will reduce to $15 million after 31 December 2012, and the competition will be terminated on 31 December 2014 unless extended by Google and the X Prize Foundation.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
