Stage set for moon dirt digging contest

Moon dirt movers
NASA has more than a passing interest in developing machines to push moon dirt around, Ken Davidian, Centennial Challenges program manager, told SPACE.com.

The space agency plans to set up a base camp on the moon's surface by 2020, where lunar regolith may be piled over or against the exterior of astronaut habitats to serve as a radiation shield, Davidian said. NASA also hopes to extract oxygen and other minerals from the untapped lunar regolith.

"But basically, before you can extract it, you've got to excavate this stuff," Davidian said.

Davidian added that NASA experts from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Glenn Research Center in Ohio, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California will be on hand for Saturday's competition.

"They'll be looking at the technologies that are going to be competing," he said.

Saturday's moon dirt digging contest will mark NASA's fifth Centennial Challenge to reach the competition level.

In addition to last week's Astronaut Glove Challenge, the space agency's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander competition met in October 2006, but yielded no winner. The agency's Beam Power and Tether challenges, which have each been held annually since 2005, have also not ended with cash-winning victors.

Any unclaimed prize money from Saturday's competition will be rolled over to the event's planned 2008 contest to add to a planned $500,000 purse, NASA said.

"We're expecting some fairly high level competition," Davidian said of Saturday's regolith-moving showdown. "It will be nice if there's another winner."

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