A few things happened today that I can finally talk about. Google announced the Google Lunar X Prize, which is a form of the X Prize that is targeted towards getting a privately-funded robot on the moon. It's a $20 million prize for the first group to do it, with additional prizes for runner-ups.
My university, Carnegie Mellon, has been at the forefront of robotics for decades. The Red Team robots have done really well at the DARPA Grand Challenge the past few years, and Carnegie Mellon's going to be fielding Boss in the new DARPA Urban Challenge later this year. Naturally, this is right down our alley.
A few hours after Google announced the Lunar X Prize, CMU announced their participation. About a week ago I was recruited to toss up a website for the CMU Moon Prize Team, so that's what I've been doing the last week or so. It's all very exciting stuff- some of the possibilities are very interesting, even for us non-robotics folk out there. Live video streaming from the surface of the moon, using the robot as an email server, letting web users drive the robot, interacting via different communication options for visitors to the website, and so on. It's not your old-school Apollo 11 mission anymore. This is something that could really be an eye-opener for your average guy who can hop online. It'll be interesting to see how this might change the public's perception of space travel.
Chalk another one up for IE. You'd think each version of any given piece of software would introduce less bugs than before. :\
Looks better than Google's lunarxprize page.
Well done.
The header alignment is messed up in IE7 -_-