Team FREDNET is offering the Google Lunar X-Prize community a new software application called the Moon 2.0 Simulator. Joshua Tristancho and Juan Martinez have designed and programmed the application to simulate a Lunar Bus Trajectory from the Earth to the Moon with a diverse set of mission variables to support a high level of customization. The application uses an OpenGL visualization that displays imagery from GoogleEarth to provide a high level of realism. Support is included for generating Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files. This XML-schema format expresses geographic positioning annotations that can be loaded and viewed in a other geospatial mapping applications that support KML (such as KDE Marble).

If you're interested in checking it out, it's available. Just download this zipfile to your Windows system, extract it, and run the "Moon" executable. The interface has a bit of a learning curve, but the release has a couple of good features that make it easy to use. It's distributed with about a dozen "Preprogrammed Mission Simulations" which a user can load up and click "Play" (via the right-click context window). Click the image to the right to enlarge a screen capture taken from the included simulation of an Apollo launch. Also, the release contains a Reference Manual (see Moon.pdf after you extract the files from the zipfile) which provides a detailed (yet concise) description of how to use Moon 2.0 Simulator. Andrés Petilo and Boone Adkins are creditted with maintaining and improving the information provided in the Moon 2.0 manual. Happy Simulating!