Blogs

Well, we got through all of the official competition attempts today. Here is a press release with information about the results. Unfortunately, no NASA prizes were awarded. You can find pictures of the day's activities here and here. We are going to continue with some demonstration runs tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM.

We finished setting up the Sandbox today, and are ready to start competition attempts first thing tomorrow morning. We measured the compaction of the JSC-1A and compacted it, and have refined our process to be used between each team's competition attempt.

Several of the excavators were revealed today, making for a nice team check-in and reception. We got to quiz some of the teams about their designs and all of the staff and judges are excited to see them operating over the next couple of days. Some of the teams will continue working on their excavators until the final deadline at 7:00 AM, when they have to turn them over for judge inspection. After this point, the excavators are "impounded" and no further modifications are permitted. This is being done as a measure to ensure that teams performing later in the lineup don't have any strategic advantage over teams going before them. The excavation hardware will be on static display throughout the event for spectators to view.

There is now an official twitter feed for the Regolith Excavation Challenge. It was created to provide more timely updates from the field leading up to and during the competition, and also to provide an extra mode of interactivity. If you are already part of the twitter community and interested in space exploration, you may have noticed that several NASA missions have begun using the service with great effect. One of them has even surpassed the popularity of popular television personalities. Ultimately, I think twitter is a good way to keep people informed about space exploration since the complexity of space missions necessitates many smaller victories for each major milestone event that occurs. When these milestones can be years apart, filling in the gaps in between becomes an important part of telling the story.

Made an appearance on The Space Show with Dr. David Livingston last night. It was really great fun to do a live show and tell people about the 2008 Regolith Excavation Challenge. I was really pleased with the questions from Dr. Livingston's listeners.

Team registration has closed, and there are a total of 25 teams currently registered to compete in the 2008 Regolith Excavation Challenge. There was a nice write-up about it in Sat-News Daily yesterday.

The rules have been updated to version 1.0 with some added information about the ramp and platform configuration and about power requirements for the markers. As before, the rules can be found here. If you are using a web browser to access them, you may need to clear your cache to get the new file.

Washington, DC – The California Space Education and Workforce Institute and California Space Authority announced today during a ceremony at NASA Headquarters that 20 teams have registered to compete in the 2008 Regolith Excavation Challenge. The teams competing for the $750,000 prize purse hail from 12 states and represent a variety of backgrounds; including universities, seasoned private sector robotics teams, and industry based competitors. The Challenge event will take place during August 2nd and 3rd on the campus of challenge co-host California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo College of Engineering.

You can click here for more information about individual teams. It is now possible to leave comments. Feel free to cheer on your favourite team.

Full Press Release

This is open to both registered regolith challenge teams and any other members of the lunar in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) or lunar exploration community that may be interested in utilizing several tons of JSC-1A for system testing.

More than ten teams have now submitted team registration packages. They come from a variety of backgrounds, including university, industry and DIY. I was able to highlight a couple of the early submitters in an article for the upcoming SpaceBound! Newsletter. Also, each of the four competitors who made it to the sandbox in 2007 have either submitted their registrations or are in the process of doing so. I would like to share that the staff here is getting excited about this competition and the interest it is generating.

We are pleased to announce today that the 2008 Regolith Excavation Challenge will take place August 2 and 3, 2008 in the Engineering Plaza on the campus of California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo. We would like to thank the Cal Poly College of Engineering for their efforts to make this a reality.

In addition, we have decided to extend the "Early Bird" registration deadline back by two weeks to January 15. This is to allow extra time for teams that may have been waiting for this announcement before registering.