According to NPR:
Google is putting up $30 million dollars to sponsor a new contest. To win the grand prize, you have to put a privately funded robotic rover on the moon.

You can get bonus prizes if your rover discovers ice or takes photos of human artifacts, like equipment left by the Apollo astronauts.

Peter Diamandis runs the X PRIZE Foundation. It tries to spur the development of new technology by putting up big cash prizes.

A few years ago, it offered the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for the first privately funded spaceflight. SpaceShipOne, a white vehicle painted with blue stars, made two brief trips to space and back — and won the prize.

"And after that, we were looking to see where do we go next," Diamandis says. "And in the space realm, what was clear to us was, really were two objectives: One is an orbital X PRIZE and the second was a lunar X PRIZE."

Diamandis decided to first aim for the moon and he got Google to put up the prize money.

"To win the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a team has to build, design, launch and then soft-land on the moon a robotic rover, and then be able to rove — to maneuver around — for about a half a kilometer, 500 meters," Diamandis explains.

There are other requirements, too. Like, the rover has to do a mooncast, sending back images to Earth.

There's a $20 million grand prize. Second prize is worth $5 million, and there's $5 million in bonus prizes for things like getting your rover to survive a frigid lunar night.

But if you want to go for it, you'd better act fast — Diamandis says it all has to happen before Dec. 31, 2014.

"I have very little doubt that it will happen," he says. "I think that we will have a winner within four years."

Executives at Google seem to agree.

"We're optimistic that we will have a lunar landing by the time this prize is done," says Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, in a video prepared for Thursday's announcement at Wired Magazine's NextFest held in Los Angeles.

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Labels: Google