Other Prize Competitions
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Centennial of Flight

image of Wright flyer

In December 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright, two bicycle mechanics working with no government support, initiated the age of powered flight with their success at Kitty Hawk. NASAs Prize Program honors the spirit of the Wright Brothers and other independent inventors by acknowledging the centennial of the first powered flight in 2003. The NASA Centennial Challenges program also recognizes that the rapid and dramatic progress in aeronautics in the early years of the first century of flight was often driven by prize competitions.

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"If we are to achieve results never before accomplished, we must expect to employ methods never before attempted."
Sir Francis Bacon
(1561‐1626)

Night Rover Challenge

    Objectives

    To stimulate innovations in energy storage technologies of value in extreme space environments and in renewable energy systems on Earth—
    • demonstrate a high energy density storage systems that meet the demands imposed by the daylight/darkness cycle on the Moon to enable a rover to operate throughout the lunar darkness cycle
    • Energy system innovations to benefit terrestrial applications, including vehicles and renewable energy generation systems.
    Allied Organization:
    The Clean Tech Open
    Redwood City, CA
    http://NightRover.org/

    Description (subject to revision during Rules development process)

    Solar energy is a renewable source that would be available on the Moon and at other destinations in space. To enable practical system demonstrations of diverse design solutions by independent teams, this Challenge may be conducted in an ambient Earth environment. Competitors with successful and appropriate system designs may be invited to test their energy storage systems in NASA thermal-vacuum chambers to demonstrate applicability to the space and lunar environment. The Challenge will be to demonstrate a portable energy storage system through several cycles of lunar daylight and darkness. During the daylight period, systems will receive electrical or thermal energy from a simulated solar collector. During darkness, the stored energy will be used for simulated thermal management, scientific experimentation, communications, and rover movement. The competitors may store and extract the energy by any means they desire. A winning system must exceed the performance of a reference state-of-the-art system by a specified margin. The winning system would be the one that has the highest energy storage density.

    Prize Purse

    $1.5 million is available from the Centennial Challenges Program. This amount may be supplemented with funds from other sources.

    More Information

    See the Night Rover website at http://NightRover.org/ for more details and preliminary schedule.

New Releases

  • NASA and The Cleantech Open Partner in Robotics Challenge

    09.21.11 - NASA has selected The Cleantech Open of Redwood, Calif., to manage the agency's Night Rover Challenge that will culminate in a competition in fall 2012.

  • NASA Announces Three New Centennial Challenges

    07.13.10 - NASA announced three new Centennial Challenges Tuesday, with an overall prize purse of $5 million. NASA's Centennial Challenges are prize competitions for technological achievements by independent teams who work without government funding.

  • Sponsors Sought For NASA's Centennial Challenges Competitions

    06.14.10 - NASA is seeking private and corporate sponsors for the Centennial Challenges, a program of incentive prizes designed for the "citizen inventor" that generates creative solutions to problems of interest to NASA and the nation.

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