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NASA Adds $5M Prizes For Robots, Solar Spacecraft
coondoggie writes "NASA today significantly expanded its Centennial Challenges program to include $5 million worth of new competitions to develop robots, small satellites, and solar powered spacecraft. One of the new competitions is the Sample Return Robot Challenge. Its purpose is to demonstrate a robot that can locate and retrieve geologic samples from wide and varied terrain without human control. This challenge has a prize purse of $1.5 million. The objectives are to encourage innovations in automatic navigation and robotic manipulator technologies."
Where's WALDO?
Nice to see that NASA is expanding their program (sweet) ...
I hope this side/outreach activity stays a side/outreach activity and not a centerpiece for what NASA should be doing (sour)
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Since when does NASA have any money? I thought all their budgets had been hacked and slashed by the gov't and other bureaucracies.
interactive hologram, or it didn't happen.
Hey man, look at what I just found! They were just sitting over there on that wall, a whole pile of free legos!
Oh bummer, I actually just submitted a story on this a few minutes ago, oops. ;) The linked article above has a decent summary, but for the curious the summary below has some links to the original NASA sources:
NASA has announced three new 'Centennial Challenge' technology prizes totaling $5M, awarded via competitions to achieve technological goals important to NASA: The $2M Nano-Satellite Launch Challenge for launching small satellites (at least 1kg) into orbit twice in one week, the $1.5M Night Rover Challenge for demonstrating a rover capable of storing and using solar energy over day/night cycles, and the $1.5M Sample Return Robot Challenge for a robot capable of locating and retrieving identifiable geologic samples in varied terrain without human control or GPS. This is in addition to the ongoing Strong Tether, Power Beaming, and Green Flight Challenges. The White House is currently seeking to boost funding for Centennial Challenges and other NASA technology programs, although many in Congress have other plans.
The NASA Chief Technologist Robert Braun is currently hosting an industry day, and you can view the webcast live (they're currently on lunch break) and read the presentation PDFs here:
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/industry_day_info.html
You can also submit questions relative to whatever the current presentation is via their official twitter account, which has been updated regularly throughout the day:
http://twitter.com/NASA_Technology
NASA pays college kids $5M to design and implement what the "best and brightest engineers money can buy" can't.
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ipp/innovation_incubator/centennial_challenges/index.html
The Nano-Satellite Launch Challenge: to place a small satellite into Earth orbit, twice in one week. The prize purse is $2 million.
From this presentation on the new Centennial Challenges, the Nano-Satellite Launch Challenge will require only a very small satellite, >1kg mass and >10cm cubic size. I'm guessing the folks in the best position to win this prize will be VTVL launchers like Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space System, who could put a smaller orbital secondary stage (either liquid or solid) on top of their reusable suborbital. I believe Virgin Galactic has also mentioned their interest in launching small orbital satellites this way, with a small orbital launcher mounted on their suborbital manned vehicle.
It's too bad Centennial Challenges is so underfunded, though, particularly when you consider that the Ares I-X suborbital rocket cost NASA ~$500M. Winning any one of these new $1.5M-$2M Challenges will probably do more to advance space exploration than what that accomplished, at a couple orders of magnitude less cost.