Here’s the map of the future: a look where all the contestants in the Google Lunar X PRIZE intend to land on the Moon, in hopes of nabbing the $30 million in prizes available to the first privately funded teams to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon. Dr. Philip J. Stooke of The University of Western Ontario has put together a this very nifty proposed landing site map based on published data from the Google Lunar X PRIZE Teams. According to Michael Doornbos from the Evadot website, assisting in the visualization, they will be updating the map regularly as the public information gets updated. Click on the image to see the original (and larger version) on Evadot.com
If you remember, the participants in the Google Lunar X PRIZE not only have to land their robot, but it also has to travel 500 meters over the lunar surface and send images and data back to the Earth. Teams must be at least 90% privately funded. The GLXP hopes to ignite a new era of lunar exploration by offering this largest international incentive prize of all time.
Find out more at The Google Lunar X PRIZE Website
I went to the X-prize site and watched the video. There are some pretty exciting ideas there! I wonder how many of the 20 sites will actually be visited? Anyone hazard a guess at the success rate? Perhaps we can agree that the figure will be rather low… never the less, Good luck to all!
P.S. Anybody need an unemployed aerospace engineering designer to do 3D modeling? ~@; )
Lets all go to the moon! via telepresence!
You send instructions through your avatar to your robot to ‘get down in that crater and give me five spectral scans on that far wall and two core samples from each of the magnetic anomalies.”
The moon’s colour in this image looks great!
Even if it lands in Tranquility base and videos the LEM lower stage it still won’t shut the conspiracy theorists up.
No but it would be so cool to see the real lander.
I want a live webcam!
There goes the neighborhood!
Sweet as. It’s is just so far past time that we get something back on the surface of the moon that it ceased to be funny 30 years back. This should be exciting indeed, and hopefully inspire a new generation of scientists and aerospace engineers to think outside the box..
Here’s the image superimposed onto another of the Apollo Lunar landings.
http://i.imgur.com/ANpT1.jpg