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No Winner In NASA's Moon-Dirt Digging Competition
Engadget is reporting that NASA's recent moon-dirt digging competition has concluded without a winner being named. "The excavator built by Technology Ranch was able to notch first place by relocating just over 143-pounds in 30 minutes, but fell quite short on picking up any award monies. So for those of you who weren't exactly ready to go mano-a-mano with these guys and gals this time around, next year you've all got $750,000 on the line."
If not for the participants.
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It seems odd NASA would need to move so much in such a short time. Although I have no problem with there being no winners in a competition where the guidelines are set, however, once on the moon, I would imagine time is not of a great significance. The cost of getting there is far more important than the cost of the time it take to move dirt. I would be more interested in who could build the lightest machine to move rock.
Then again, as I think about it, 140 lbs is not a whole lot of rock. Doing some quick calculations if might take several months to excavate a useful cavern at that rate. Hrmm... *goes back to his calculations*
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1 Watt == 1 Joule per second
That also is 1 Amp at 1 Volt per second, but that's not the primary way you talk about a Watt.
A Watt is a unit of work, i.e. Energy per Time.
It was 30Kw IIRC, still no mean feat given the weight constraints.
No it was 30W, which is actually quite a bit of power for something intended to be soft landed on the Moon. Where your only practical power source is however many photovoltaic cells the thing can carry with it.