SPACE.com -- NASA's Moon Dirt Digging Contest Yields No Winners

An artist's interpretation of autonomous robots digging through regolith on the Moon's surface. Credit: CSEWI.

The Lunar Miners, a team from the University of Missouri-Rolla, will compete in NASA's 2007 Regolith Excavation Challenge with this two-conveyer belt robot. Credit: UMR.

A loader holds one of the one-ton bags of JSC-1A Moon regolith simulant as it is being emptied into a sandbox for NASA's 2007 Regolith Excavation Challenge. Just beyond the sandbox on the right are unopened bags of JSC-1A simulant ready to be loaded next into the sandbox. Credit: California Space Authority.

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	NASA's Moon Dirt Digging Contest Yields No Winners By The Associated Press posted: 13 May 2007 12:34 p.m. ET

SANTA MARIA, Calif. (AP) -- Four teams and some strange machines competed for a quarter-of-a-million dollars from NASA, but all walked away empty-handed.

NASA's Regolith Excavation Challenge invited teams to build machines for digging mock moon dirt, or regolith, in a competition held in a one-ton sandbox on Saturday.

But all the teams fell well short of the winning requirement of 330 pounds of regolith deposited in a container in 30 minutes, and no one claimed the $250,000 purse.

An excavator built by Technology Ranch of Pismo Beach did the best, collecting just over 143 pounds in half an hour. All the other machines broke down while digging.

The other three teams were from Berkley, Michigan; Bolla, Missouri and Rancho Palos Verdes.

The prize rolls over to next year's competition, which will be worth $750,000.