Eileen and I left the great country of Canada yesterday to venture south for the annual SRS Robothon event. I’ve been giddy all week to get here, but wasn’t quite prepared for the hour and a half wait at the border. This gave us a chance to debate why the border crossing was so slow. We reached two possible answers:

1. The border guards believe if they inflict enough suffering on travelers they will discourage future trips, making it will be easier to pick out the terrorists (who will come anyways) from the tourists (who will instead fly to their destination)
2. Like the people living near Tijuana, everyone in Vancouver has decided to venture to that third-world country to the south to buy cheap stuff, go to wild parties and be a nuisance on the local population

Either explanation works for me. Along the way, we say a couple of very funny bumper stickers.

We had a lot of fun making jokes about both of these, although we expected that you’d never see both of these on the same car. Otherwise it was an uneventful trip to Seattle, and we arrived by dinner time.

I’ll be posting my photos from Robothon as soon as I get back to Vancouver.

And a follow-up from the last post, apparently there is some potential legal issues with simply plunking your robot on the Moon without a permit. Really? Would they give you a parking ticket?

In the last post I wrote about some practical issues that occurred to me as I fantasized about being involved in building the first private lunar rover. I still think about it in that way, but today a new thought occurred to me: will there be historical preservation of Moon landing sites?

Back in 1969 Neil Armstrong placed his footprints (bootprints, really) on the lunar soil, marking one of the greatest technical achievements NASA has ever made. The location of these prints is well documented. Google’s contest provides extra incentive for visits to historical sites, and what site is more spectacular than right on top of the Eagle lander?

Once your robot arrives, you are supposed to drive around capturing video and broadcasting back to Earth. Since one of the most significant views of this most significant site would be those very first footprints, will your robot drive over and snap a picture or two? Of course! But what if your robot doesn’t do exactly what its commanded, but instead drives over and literally erases those famous prints?

Opps.

Or, in a fit of absolute mania, you decided you were entitled to own the rights to the very last video footage of those prints, and purposefully ordered your robot to do the fatal damage? What if you decided to sell the right to do this damage? Would anyone buy it? Would it even be illegal?

Today Google and the X Prize Foundation revealed their latest challenge: a potential $20 million (and up to $30 million including the bonus challenges) for landing a robot on the moon, roam around a little bit, and send back some video.

Hmmm. Sounds very interesting and is likely a very difficult problem. My first thoughts about the challenge:

• Roaming around on the surface of the moon will be very dusty, thus any exposed gears or moving parts will be gunked up in about 10 seconds
• I have no idea what vacuum does to gear motors, electronics, etc. but you gotta believe it will be different than roaming around in my living room
• Landing on the moon is very challenging; many of the early Russian and US probes crashed
• Soft-landing is hard because there isn’t any atmosphere for parachutes, but air bags might help (I don’t know if anyone has tried this though, I believe rockets are the conventional approach to control descent velocity)
• Sending back good quality video probably isn’t terribly difficult but having a camera that operates after a rough landing and operating in vacuum might be; I have no idea how difficult the antenna aiming would be but I’d expect you could rent time on some serious radio telescopes here on Earth to receive the stream once it was directed in the right direction
• I recall the Russians succeeded in landing a tele-operated rover Lunokhod 1 back in 1970 but likely cost way more than $30 million
• The Lunokhod probes were very successful and not a bad model for this challenge
• Lifting a robot to outer space and on to the moon is really difficult – just to get to orbit requires accelerating to greater than 8,000 meters per second – and I imagine efficient navigation to the moon is quite delicate too
• There is a lot of information available about potential landing sites but to really maximize the prize money you’d have to land near something else (like a NASA Lunar Module or Lunokhod 1)
• It is probably worthwhile to budget for multiple attempts, especially in terms of that soft landing

I’m am really excited about this contest. I doubt I have a chance to participate but you can believe I’m going to follow whomever does make the attempt.

What do you think about this contest? How would you solve some of these problems?