Google Lunar X Prize calls for teams to compete in successfully launching, landing, and operating a rover on the lunar surface. The prize awards US$20 million to the first team to land a rover on the moon that successfully roves more than 500 meters and transmits back high definition images and video. There is a $5 million second prize, as well as $5 million in potential bonus prizes for extra features such as roving long distances (greater than 5,000 meters), capturing images of man made objects on the moon, detecting ice on one of the Moon's craters, or surviving a lunar night. The X Prize offers the first prize until December 31, 2012, thereafter it offers $15 million until December 31, 2014.
Read more about this topic: Space Competition
Famous quotes containing the words lunar and/or prize:
“A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)