The entire $750,000 prize purse for the 2009 Regolith Excavation Challenge was awarded today. The winners of 1st, 2nd and 3rd place were Paul's Robotics, Terra Engineering, and Team Braundo respectively. Thanks to all who participated to make this the best Regolith Challenge yet. Between all the teams, we had more total regolith simulant excavated during this competition than ever before and saw a variety of excavation technologies demonstrated.

After a long day of preparation (or rather, a series of them), the stage is set for the 2009 Regolith Excavation Challenge. We have a record number of teams participating this year, with 20 of the 23 registered teams checked in and ready or nearly ready to compete for the $750,000 prize. The excavators this year are impressive and the teams seem to be well prepared for their bouts with the sandbox. Moreover, they are also very enthusiastic despite the long hours of preparation behind them and the enormous challenge awaiting them in the morning.

I have posted a google doc with more detailed information about the communications link to the FAQ. It should be pretty straight forward and requires almost no special configuration outside the wide area network emulator itself. We will be using the VirtualBox platform in order to reduce hardware dependencies and to facilitate simpler logistics. This will also make it easier for teams to test the delay settings without requiring additional computer or networking hardware. An example setup is described in the document that could be used for testing purposes. As questions come in, the document linked above will be updated.

There is an update to the rules specifying that CSEWI will now be providing the portion of the communications link that will generate the required delay. This change was made in order to create a more level playing field by ensuring that the monitoring of the communications link will be done in a consistent fashion for every team.

Here is a video with some interesting information about excavation systems that have been tested by NASA, and some of the things they are considering using them for. Featured is NASA's Rob Mueller, who has participated on our panel of judges for the Regolith Excavation Challenge every year since it's beginning in 2007.

The competition date has been moved to October 17-18, 2009. The possibility of changing the date was evaluated closely, and it was determined that overall, it would be better for all to change the date. One advantage of moving the competition date is that we now expect to make our sandbox available for testing prior to the competition date, something that has been requested for years. More details about this will be available in the next month. The team agreement and rules documents are in the process of being updated, and should be available early next week.

There seems to have been a technical difficulty resulting from a recent upgrade to the web site. Posting new topics and comments in the forum are going to be down until it is resolved.

Please note that the team agreement has been updated with new deadlines in order to give everybody more time to register. The updated documents are available at http://regolith.csewi.org/rulesandregistration.

The final rules have been posted to http://regolith.csewi.org/rulesandregistration

Just a quick note to let everybody know that we plan to open team registration either later today or on Monday. This will also come with the release of the final version of the rules. We decided to make a change to the final registration deadline so that teams would have as much time as possible to get registered and submit documentation.

We have updated http://regolith.csewi.org to a new platform and now have a forum and other new functionality.

Based on the questions and the inputs received in response to the previous draft, the draft rules have been updated. The file is here.

The changes are as follows:

• Communications link bandwidth limit of 1 Mbps is now required
• Communications link minimum delay has been increased to 2.0 seconds
• Excavation Hardware now starts with reference point at center of starting cell with the orientation decided by the team
• A new requirement has been introduced to traverse across the sandbox in order to maintain the need for mobility with a known starting location.

The draft rules document is here. This document was prepared with input from NASA ISRU stakeholders, past competitors and other stakeholders. Among our goals is to make the rules as "user friendly" as possible, meaning that we hope they are easy to understand, clearly define the goal of the competition, and only push meaningful requirements to the teams so that the solution space is as large as possible while still driving solutions that are useful to NASA.

Plans are coming together well for the 2009 Regolith Excavation Challenge, and we are planning to hold the challenge event on the weekend of August 15, 2009. The rules will remain very similar to the 2008 competition, with the exception that we plan to allow teams to utilize telerobotic operations. In this case, the definition of telerobotic operations will include some of the limitations consistent with operating a robotic system on the lunar surface from a control station on the earth. A formal announcement with information about the CA location, draft rules, and team registration is forthcoming.

Just a quick note to let you know that another Regolith Excavation Challenge is expected later in 2009. In addition, California Space Authority is expected to continue as Co-Host of the event with the California Space Education and Workforce Institute. We still have a lot of details to be worked out, so stay tuned for more information in the next few weeks.

For those of you who use Twitter (or haven't but are adventurous enough to try it out), you can follow @regolith_chal (http://twitter.com/regolith_chal) for smaller updates. Milestone level announcements such as rules releases and important dates are planned to be made via this email list. For information about all of the NASA Centennial Challenges, you can also follow @nasaprize (http://twitter.com/nasaprize) for updates.