As Carnegie Mellon University’s famed robotics professor William “Red” Whittaker put it, the prestigious school doesn’t “do anything just for a prize.”
But after the school and its private partner, Astrobotic, found out Tuesday that they had won a combined $750,000 in Milestone prizes in two categories for their efforts to be the first private team to put a robotic rover on the moon, Mr. Whittaker added in the school’s news release that “when a check like this comes our way, we cash it.”
The judges for the $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE awarded Astrobotic and CMU the money for showing that they had overcome technical challenges in the race to be the first to rocket a rover to space, land it on the moon, drive it 500 meters and send back high-definition video of the mission.
“The award of these Milestone Prizes is evidence that the partnership between Astrobotic and Carnegie Mellon is powerful and that our technologies are setting the pace for the Google Lunar XPRIZE teams,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton said in a statement.
At least four of the 18 teams still in the XPRIZE competition also are eligible for one or more of the Milestone prizes. XPRIZE said it will announce additional winners in the coming weeks.
Astrobotic, which is developing the lunar lander for the team’s entry and other aspects of the mission, won $250,000 in the “imaging” category.
In testing earlier this year, the private Strip District-headquartered company demonstrated that its camera head for the mission’s lunar rover “could operate in thermal vacuum and capture, compress, and transmit high-definition video in lunar-relevant terrain and lighting,” according to Astrobotic’s news release.
CMU, which is developing the lunar rover, won $500,000 in the “mobility” category by showing that its rover, nicknamed Andy, could survive the vacuum, high radiation and extreme cold of the moon.
“Andy has proven to be a tough, smart, sure-footed machine,” said Mr. Whittaker, who leads a team of about 50 CMU students and staff working on the project. “We’ve shaken it to simulate launch forces, driven it through moon dirt and exposed it to the extremes of lunar temperatures among many, many tests.”
Mr. Whittaker first entered the XPRIZE contest in 2007, and created the private firm Astrobotic a year later to team up with the staff and students at the school. The team will use the $750,000 to continue to develop the imaging and mobility technologies for the mission.
In an expected announcement, XPRIZE also announced that it was moving back by one year the date by which the teams must complete their missions to win the prize.
The new deadline of Dec. 31, 2016, is the third time that XPRIZE has moved the date back because of recognition that what “we are are asking teams to accomplish is extremely difficult and unprecedented, not only from a technological standpoint, but also in terms of financial considerations,” XPRIZE vice chairman and president Robert K. Weiss said in a statement.
First Published: December 16, 2014, 5:10 p.m.
Updated: December 17, 2014, 4:23 a.m.
