Here's your big chance to play with a shovel in the sandbox -- and win a $250,000 U.S. prize.
As 200 scientists gathered to launch the weeklong International Lunar Conference in Toronto yesterday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced a contest to develop a robot that can dig lunar dirt.
"They bring in their rovers and each get 30 minutes in the sandbox," NASA spokesman Brant Sponberg explained. "The machine that autonomously excavates and delivers the most lunar soil simulant to a collection point in 30 minutes wins the purse."
You don't have to schlep your digger to the moon, though -- just to California. The California Space Agency will provide what NASA calls the "sandbox," filled with 16 metric tonnes of a substance simulating lunar regolith -- dirt with the texture of talcum powder that is very tightly packed.
The contest will take place in the fall of 2006 or spring of 2007, and anyone can play, provided an American leads every team.
"We have to have someone who's a U.S. citizen to give the big fake cheque to," Mr. Sponberg said.
Another NASA prize, this year's $50,000 "Beam Power Challenge" (for wireless transmission of power) involves teams from the University of British Columbia and University of Saskatchewan, he noted.
Meanwhile, in Washington yesterday, NASA released a $104-billion plan to build a new generation of rockets that will return humans for a permanent presence on the moon and beyond.
The new system, which NASA expects to launch in 2018, would expand upon the Apollo program that first put astronauts into space in 1969. Crew members would travel in a capsule sitting atop a rocket, and would have a separate heavy-lift vehicle to take only cargo into orbit. The new, bigger capsule would carry six people, instead of Apollo's three, and be able to stay in lunar orbit for six months.
NASA officials in Toronto said the lunar digger contest proves the United States doesn't want another space race, and would prefer to work in concert with other space programs to conquer the moon.
"It's more like a space smorgasbord," Jim Garvin, NASA's chief scientist, said in an interview in Toronto.
And he added, "The moon is our training camp for the big kahuna, the Mars trip."
With hotel room shades tightly drawn against the sun Sunday, scientists ogled pictures of unmanned rockets that over the next few years will take part in what Mr. Garvin dubbed a "lunar armada."
The European Space Agency was first, launching in 2003 a probe the size of a washing machine that since March has sent back new pictures of the moon's north pole, ESA chief scientist Bernard Foing said.
"Europe is at the moon," he said. "We are quite proud of our little SMART 1 vehicle." He said other countries can "propose dedicated targets" for further study by SMART 1, while fuel supplies last. But the rocket has only 0.7 kilograms of fuel left, and will crash on the moon next year.
Next up is China, whose Chang E rocket -- named for a lady of Chinese legend who flew to the moon -- it set to blast off in 2006 for its own mission to orbit and study the moon.
Oh well. I've included the story in my post.
