Tag - robot

Finally, the much anticipated Google Lunar X PRIZE 2012 team summit video is up for your viewing pleasure!

From the Earth to the Moon

This article is part one of a five part series about going back to the Moon with the Google Lunar X PRIZE by Nathan Wong

“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” Well in the case of the Google Lunar X PRIZE it is both. Building systems that can operate on the Moon is a difficult task, but so is the task of getting a payload to the lunar surface safely. There have been 19 successful soft landings on the Moon, from Luna 9 on January 31, 1966 to Luna 24 on August 14, 1976, including the Apollo missions. The Apollo missions used the largest launch vehicle ever successfully launched, the Saturn V, to land its payload on the Moon. The Saturn V weighed 2.3 million kg (5 million lbs.) with a payload capacity of approximately 45,000 kg (100,000 lbs.) to lunar injection orbit. The teams competing in the Google Lunar X PRIZE won’t need that large of a rocket to get their vehicle to the lunar surface, but the steps on how to get there are the similar.

We can break down the journey to the Moon into five distinct events that all need to happen successfully. Those events are the launch, trans lunar injection, lunar orbit insertion, lunar descent orbit, and landing.

25 teams from around the world are currently building robots, rockets, and lunar landers to win the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE.

This year shows some impressive advancements in the rover designs, propulsion and avionics technology. Teams are stepping it up as the competition thickens and with all the recent headlining developments in space, the Moon does not seem so far away.

Do you love LEGO and robots? Want to win a trip to the Island of Hawaii? Then get your camera ready and produce the most awesome MoonBots Video!

The X PRIZE Foundation and the LEGO Group today announced MoonBots 2012: A Google Lunar X PRIZE LEGO® MINDSTORMS® Challenge. This third annual contest will challenge teams of youth to study the history of heritage artifacts left on the Moon, while getting an opportunity to learn about the new and exciting things that private industry and government are doing in the arena of space exploration, including the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE.

It’s the night of the big game. From the locker room you can hear the crowd maintain a steady roar that almost hums like television static in the background. You’re focused and your mind is in the zone. Final preparations are made before you finally take that slow-motion walk out of the entry tunnel and set foot on the stadium floor to a crowd of 20,000+ people, each one of them waiting intently to see what you’re capable of. This is the big show.

You want to talk about space, do ya? You want the inside track from people involved in the industry but you want to pick their brains and learn from them on a personal level? You want to do these things and you haven't heard of Space Up? Here, I'll fix all of these problems at once.

It has been spoken of for decades. The same bright spots in our mind that give life to creativity and ingenuity also harbor the darkest recesses of our imagination. We are an innovative lot with aspirations to construct the future exponentially through the use of steel, crafted in our image, but that which has been designed to build will also destroy. They carry the dreams of our future but also hold its fate. I am, of course, speaking of the impending robot apocalypse. O_O