Forty years after the first lunar rover rolled across the moon's surface, 84 teams of enterprising future engineers will demonstrate the same ingenuity and can-do spirit at the 18th annual NASA Great Moon buggy Race, set for April 1-2 in Huntsville, Ala.
The event challenges high school and college students to design, build and race lightweight, human-powered rovers "moon buggies" which address many of the same engineering challenges dealt with by Apollo-era lunar rover developers in the late 1960s.Teams include U.S. high school, college and university students from 22 states and Puerto Rico; and international challengers from six countries, including returning teams from Canada, India and Germany and for the first time racers from Ethiopia, Pakistan and Russia. For a complete list of competitors.
In communities all across the U.S., travelers that went to the moon and back with the Apollo 14 mission are living out their quiet lives. The whereabouts of more than 50 are known. Many, now aging, reside in prime retirement locales: Florida, Arizona and California. A few are in the Washington.
Hundreds more are out there or at least, they were. And Dave Williams of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., wants to find them before it's too late.The voyagers in question are not astronauts. They're "moon trees" redwood, loblolly pine, sycamore, Douglas fir, and sweetgum trees sprouted from seeds that astronaut Stuart Roosa took to the moon and back 40 years ago."Hundreds of moon trees were distributed as seedlings," says Williams, "but we don't have systematic records showing where they all went."
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