September 14 News Items

Google to Sponsor Lunar Lander Prize (Source: SpaceToday.net)
Google has agreed to sponsor $30 million in prizes for the first privately-developed lunar rovers. The Google Lunar X Prize competition will award $20 million to the first private spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon, rove at least 500 meters, and return a series of high-resolution panoramic images and videos. A $5 million prize will go to the second company to achieve the feat, with the remaining $5 million set aside for bonus prizes, such as discovering water ice. The prize competition will be run by the X Prize Foundation, which ran the $10-million Ansari X Prize competition for privately developed manned suborbital spacecraft. The prize expires at the end of 2014. A group at Carnegie Mellon University has already announced its intent to compete for the prize.

Satellite to Test Special Deliveries From Space (Source: MSNBC)
Russia’s Foton science satellite will include an innovative space transportation experiment that is testing a theoretically cheaper method of returning small cargo from the international space station — and it’s been designed and developed by a team of students organized by the European Space Agency. The approach is to use a space tether as a transportation mechanism, a concept so risky and revolutionary that existing space agencies have for years been afraid of even trying it out for fear of an embarrassing failure. The Young Engineers Satellite 2, or YES2 for short, is piggybacking into orbit aboard Russia's Foton-M3 satellite.

The YES2 objective is to demonstrate the ability to fling a small landing capsule down into the atmosphere without the use of rockets at all. Instead, the tiny 12-pound (5.5-kilogram) heat-shielded sphere, nicknamed "Fotino," will be lowered from the Foton-M3 to the end of a 19-mile-long (30-kilometer-long) fishline-thin tether (the reel is called "Floyd"), and then released.

County Sponsors Space Forum (Source: ERAU)
Brevard County, on Florida's Space Coast, sponsored a Sep. 14 forum on space industry issues, intended to identify issues requiring federal and state action in support of statewide space industry development. Elected officials and industry leaders from around the state participated. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University participated to represent education and research interests.

The Planetary Society Is Ready to Fly You to the Moon (Source: Planetary Society)
The Moon looms large for The Planetary Society this week. Japan's Kaguya mission will launch on its journey there on Sep. 13, carrying more than 400,000 names and messages that the Society helped gather from well-wishers around the world. And today The Planetary Society announces a new opportunity to send names aboard an upcoming lunar-bound mission. Anyone can send their name, and those of friends and loved ones, to the Moon aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The launch of Kaguya will also kick off an International Lunar Decade, a period when several nations are actively planning missions to the Moon, leading to a proposed human-occupied lunar base. Visit http://www.planetary.org/home/ for information.