Six teams
from across the country are headed for a rumble in California on Saturday,
where $250,000 in NASA prize money awaits the best robotic Moon dirt diggers.
The
contest, NASA's
2007 Regolith Excavation Challenge, will pit the autonomous robots against
one another to determine which can move the most mock lunar dirt - or regolith
- in 30 minutes at the Santa Maria Fairpark in Santa Maria, California.
"We've got
a great group of teams," said Matt Everingham, special projects manager for the
California Space Authority, a co-host for the competition. "They have a variety
of configurations and a variety of construction styles...I can't wait to see
them operating."
The contest
is part of NASA's Centennial Challenges program, which offers cash prizes for
technological feats in order to spur interest and development in spaceflight
technology.
Unlike NASA's
Astronaut Glove Challenge, which awarded one $200,000 prize on May 3 to unemployed
Maine engineer Peter Homer after his homemade spacesuit glove beat out those of
to other teams, the Regolith Excavation Challenge is offering three top prizes totaling
$250,000. They are split into $125,000, $75,000 and $50,000 prizes respectively
for first, second and third place.
The California
Space Education and Workforce Institute (CSEWI) is overseeing the contest for
NASA.
About 130
students ranging between Kindergarten and Grade 12 will also compete on
Saturday during the California RoboChallenge.
The contest
calls for students to construct their own robots out of Legos to either follow
lines or compete in sumo wrestling-like feats, organizers said. Like the
Regolith Excavation Challenge, the competition is aimed at spurring interest in
science and technology.
"We need to
have something to excite their interest again," Deborah Hirsh, executive
director of CSEWI, said in an interview.
Digging
for dollars
To win the
cash prizes for NASA's Regolith Challenge, teams must demonstrate fully
autonomous robots capable of collecting at least 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of
mock Moon dirt within 30 minutes. Whichever robot moves the most regolith over
the benchmark limit, while still meeting contest specifications, wins, NASA
said.
But in
order to compete, lunar regolith excavators must weigh less than 88 pounds (40
kilograms) and run on less than 30 kilowatts of power, according to contest
rules.
For one
team, the Lunar Miners at the University of Missouri-Rolla in Rolla, Missouri,
the solution turned out to be a two-conveyor belt number.
"One has a
number of scoops on it to excavate regolith...the other delivers the excavated
regolith to a collector," said the team's co-leader Joel Logue, a senior
studying engineering, in a statement. "Excavation by a conveyor was found most
energy effective after evaluating several other possible designs."
Everingham
said teams will have about 10 minutes to set up their machines at a sandbox
filled with JSC-1a, a simulated Moon dirt developed for NASA's Johnson Space
Center. Once in place, the machines will be switched on and left to run by undisturbed
for a half hour.
"They have
to be fully autonomous," he said. "That's an important detail."
Moon dirt movers
NASA has more
than a passing interest in developing machines to push Moon dirt around, Ken
Davidian, Centennial Challenges program manager, told SPACE.com.
The space
agency plans to set up a base camp on the Moon's
surface by 2020, where lunar regolith may be piled over or against the
exterior of astronaut habitats to serve as a radiation shield, Davidian said.
NASA also hopes to extract oxygen and other minerals from the untapped lunar
regolith.
"But basically,
before you can extract it, you've got to excavate this stuff," Davidian said.
Davidian added
that NASA experts from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Glenn
Research Center in Ohio, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
California will be on hand for Saturday's competition.
"They'll be
looking at the technologies that are going to be competing," he said.
Saturday's
Moon dirt digging contest will mark NASA's fifth Centennial Challenge to reach
the competition level.
In addition
to last week's Astronaut Glove Challenge, the space agency's Northrop Grumman
Lunar Lander competition met in October 2006, but yielded no winner. The agency's
Beam Power and
Tether challenges, which have each been held annually since 2005, have also
not ended with cash-winning victors.
Any
unclaimed prize money from Saturday's competition will be rolled over to the
event's planned 2008 contest to add to a planned $500,000 purse, NASA said.
"We're
expecting some fairly high level competition," Davidian said of Saturday's
regolith-moving showdown. "It will be nice if there's another winner."
advertisement
