Nvidia Tegra Systems May Get A Ticket To The Moon

Nvidia's Tegra has booked a ticket to the moon as a part of Team Synergy Moon from Google's Lunar X Prize competition. The Lunar X Prize is a $30 million competition which offers an opportunity to the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon. The contenders for Google's Lunar X project have to be 90 per cent privately funded though sales to the goverment are allowed without limit.

Team Synergy Moon is designing  'The Tesla Prospector' whose mission is to successfully travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send images and data back to the Earth. It has planned so by implementing a couple of rovers capable of locomoting on the lunar landscape. These rovers are supposed to run on several Tegra systems. Along with the Tesla Prospector, the Team has also developed Tesla Surveyor, which will be packing twin HD cameras while rolling across the lunar surface.

The decision to use Tegra systems comes from a young scientist on board named Martin Peniak who apparently was impressed by an article about a neural network using Nvidia GPU acceleration. As a result, Peniak chose CUDA as a basis for the rovers' development and underlying AI. Martin Peniak is known for his inputs on Mars Rover Simulator developed along with European Space Agency.

If Team synergy Moon wins the competition the two rovers will be launched in December of 2012.

 

Article Source: tomshardware Image Credit: Synergy Moon