Carnegie Mellon To Compete In Google Lunar X-Prize 59
An anonymous reader writes "Google's Lunar X-Prize already has a prominent entry. William Whittaker, a researcher from Carnegie Mellon University said that he will be assembling a team to develope a robot that will be be competing for the $20 million grand prize. According to a TG Daily story, Whittaker has some unfair advantages, as he previously developed a lunar rover for NASA that 'can find concentrations of hydrogen, possibly water and other volatile chemicals on the moon that could be mined to produce fuel, water and air that are essential for supporting lunar outposts.' The Lunar X-Prize runs until the end of 2012 and Carnegie Mellon's announcement could be a first indication that researchers are taking this challenge very seriously."
Why is this an unfair advantage? (Score:5, Informative)
Why is this unfair? Here is the summarized requirements from the Google Lunar X-Prize [googlelunarxprize.org] home page:
It sounds to me like Carnegie Mellon University has the right idea. There are quite a few talented rocket scientists [wikipedia.org] out there. Why not utilize them as a resource?
Getting there is half the fun (Score:4, Informative)
It seems that one of the hardest parts of the prize is the communications problem. The prize conditions specify approximately a gigabyte of data to be transmitted from the moon, with some data gathered on-site and some carried along by the vehicle. It turns out that the data rate necessary to transmit that much data within one lunar day seems to be higher than can realistically be achieved without an aimed high-gain antenna. That in turn puts a lower bound on the size of hardware that has to be landed on the moon.
[*: On the most fasciniating list I've ever lurked.]