|
Wednesday April 22, 2009
|
The commercial space race has hit a fever pitch. Private sector firms are scrambling to deliver production-ready, reusable spacecraft, while NASA looks into building a permanent lunar outpost. Recently, Google announced the Lunar X PRIZE, which will grant $30 million to the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters, and send images, video, and other data back home. Scientists are still discovering things about the moon today, in fact.
Now NASA is teaming up with a company called Odyssey Moon to develop small, robotic lunar landers based on NASA's own Common Spacecraft Bus, according to Engadget. The goal is to create landers that can carry about 110 pounds of payload and travel back and forth from the earth to the moon. For more information on the project, head to Odyssey Moon's Web site--and try to ignore that horrifying "Moon 2.0" nomenclature--or check out Engineering TV's video interview with Odyssey Moon's CEO.
|
|
|
Mixx It
Digg It
Stumble
More...
April 22, 2009 7:36 PM
Woo! It's about time. It's kind of remarkable that we have Spirit and Oppy scooting around the surface of Mars, but we don't have anyone scooting around the surface of the moon! And it'd be a much easier trip on the poor guys, too!
That and I'm looking forward to some live photos of the lunar landing sites! The light travel time between the Earth and the Moon is short enough they could even stream a feed if they wanted to!
May 11, 2009 7:00 AM
What I find hard to understand is why we have never seen photographs taken from Earth of the equipment NASA left on the surface of the Moon. Surely the telescopes we have today are more than able to produce such shots?