In news– Recently, NASA has opened the Second phase of Watts on the Moon Challenge which offers $4.5 million in prizes to design, build, and demonstrate a prototype that addresses technology gaps in power transmission and energy storage.
About Watts on the Moon Challenge-
- The Challenge is an approximately 36-month competition with a $5 million prize to incentivize new solutions for integrating power transmission and energy storage in order to enable missions operating in the extreme cold vacuum of the lunar surface.
- Phase 1 of this challenge lasted approximately 8 months and offered $500,000 in prize purses.
- To compete in Phase 1, teams had to submit ideas to support aspects of a hypothetical mission scenario – harvesting water and oxygen from a dark crater at the Moon’s South Pole with energy generated by a power plant located on the crater’s outer rim.
- Phase 2 of this challenge will last approximately 30 months and offer up to $4,500,000 in prize purses.
- It seeks solutions for energy distribution, management, and/or storage that address NASA technology gaps and can be further developed for space flight and future operation on the lunar surface.
- This Challenge is managed by NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and is part of Centennial Challenges, based at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
- Centennial Challenges is a part of the Prizes and Challenges program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.
Source: NASA
