Nine new Google Lunar X Prize teams announced by Google

Nine new Google Lunar X Prize teams were announced today at the Google Headquaters. The teams have fulfilled all the requirements of registration with the competition (including writing a check for the $1,000 entrance fee) and are now in the running for the $20 million prize for the first private robotic mission to the moon that can rove 500 meters and send a "mooncast" back to Earth.

The second place team can rove away with $5 million of their own and another pot of $5 million is available for completing "bonus" task such as finding ice, or surviving the 14 lunar night. Space Florida also announced that they are offering a $2 million dollar bonus if the winner takes off from Cape Canaveral. All the prizes expire December 31, 2014.

The nine new teams are: Astrobotic, Red Whittaker's team from Carnegie Mellon which has already been in the headlines; ARCA, a Romanian team that also competed for the Ansari X Prize; Chandah, whose founder is CEO of the largest retail electricity provider in Texas; Frednet, a group of open source developers who want to bring that solution to support lunar exploration; LunaTrex, a gro formed of previous Ansari X Prize competitors, universities and companies; Micro-Space, a company that has been competing for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge and has a lot of experience with bipropellant liquid rockets; Quantum3, led by Paul Carliner, a senior executive in the aerospace industry; Southern California Selene Group, taking an "elegantly simple design that is relatively inexpensive to implement", Team Italia, lead by Prof. Amalia Ercoli-Finzi, it is a collaboration between several universities.

Source: blog.wired.com