{"id":157,"date":"2007-09-13T19:45:28","date_gmt":"2007-09-14T03:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/?p=157"},"modified":"2007-09-15T17:28:22","modified_gmt":"2007-09-16T01:28:22","slug":"to-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/?p=157","title":{"rendered":"To The Moon!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today Google and the X Prize Foundation revealed their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/science\/space\/magazine\/15-10\/ff_moon\">latest challenge<\/a>: 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.<\/p>\n<p>Hmmm. Sounds very interesting and is likely a very difficult problem. My first thoughts about the challenge:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Roaming around on the surface of the moon will be <em>very<\/em> dusty, thus any exposed gears or moving parts will be gunked up in about 10 seconds<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>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<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Landing on the moon is very challenging; many of the early Russian and US probes crashed<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Soft-landing is hard because there isn&#8217;t any atmosphere for parachutes, but air bags might help (I don&#8217;t know if anyone has tried this though, I believe rockets are the conventional approach to control descent velocity)<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Sending back good quality video probably isn&#8217;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&#8217;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<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>I recall the Russians succeeded in landing a tele-operated rover <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lunokhod_1\">Lunokhod 1<\/a> back in 1970 but likely cost way more than $30 million<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>The Lunokhod probes were very successful and not a bad model for this challenge<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Lifting a robot to outer space and on to the moon is really difficult &#8211; just to get to orbit requires accelerating to greater than 8,000 meters per second &#8211; and I imagine efficient navigation to the moon is quite delicate too<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>There is a lot of information available about potential landing sites but to really maximize the prize money you&#8217;d have to land near something else (like a NASA Lunar Module or Lunokhod 1)<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>It is probably worthwhile to budget for multiple attempts, especially in terms of that soft landing<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m am really excited about this contest. I doubt I have a chance to participate but you can believe I&#8217;m going to follow whomever does make the attempt.<\/p>\n<p>What do you think about this contest? How would you solve some of these problems?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-robots","category-space-exploration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobandeileen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}