German Entry in Google Lunar X Prize Plans Visit to Apollo 17 Landing Site

December 1, 2016 – The competition among 16 remaining teams for the Google Lunar X Prize continues to heat up with one entry, a multi-country German-based  Part-Time Scientists (PT)  team supported by Audi AG, the automotive company, planning to land a pair of rovers near the site of the last Apollo Moon mission, the Taurus-Littrow Valley. The mission is scheduled to go up on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket either late next year or in early 2018.

Why visit the Apollo 17 site? For those into conspiracy theories, maybe the visit is to debunk the notion that the entire Apollo program was filmed on a Hollywood movie set. But no that’s not the purpose. It’s more about studying the impact of long-term space exposure on equipment left behind on the surface on December 19, 1972, almost 44 years ago.

Karsen Becker, the PT rover driver, asks specifically about the condition of the lunar buggy seen in the picture above, “has it been ripped to shreds by micro meteoroids, or is it still standing there like on the day they left?”

Although NASA considers all Apollo moon landing sites to be sacrosanct and off limits, the rule is a landing can be no closer than 2 kilometers away and rovers must keep a distance of 200 meters from the artifacts, the PT team believes they can honour these restrictions.

The PT mission team has already won two milestone prizes in the competition. They received $500,000 for the Mobility Prize and $250,000 for the Imaging Prize. But their real goal is to win the $20 million U.S. grand prize in a 14.5 day mission to deliver a lander (seen in the picture below) to the surface.

The lander will release two rovers. A picture of one of them can be seen below. Each will be equipped with a 4-wheel electric drive, tiltable solar panels, rechargeable batteries, a set of three-lens high definition cameras, a laser to try fusing regolith in a test to see if the material can be used to build habitats, and a plant enclosed within a sealed container to see if it can successfully grow in the lunar environment.

The Google Lunar X Prize is a challenge to inspire entrepreneurs and engineers to deliver a low-cost method for space exploration using robotics. The team winning the grand prize must successfully place their robot on the Moon’s surface and have it travel a distance of at least 500 meters (1,640 feet) while transmitting high-definition video and images back to Earth.

Currently an Israel-based team, SpaceIL, is the first to sign a launch contract scheduled for the second half of 2017. Spaceflight Industries, an American company that books slots for launches will handle the entire mission for SpaceIL and has recently purchased a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the mission.