NASA has awarded $30,000 in prize money to each of the five teams that won in the third ground tournament round of a $5 million competition that seeks to promote the development of small satellites for future space exploration missions.The space agency said Tuesday the winning teams in the Cube Quest Challenge’s ground tournament-3 include Team Miles from Fluid & Reason, Cislunar Explorers from Cornell University, CU-E3 from University of Colorado, KitCube from MIT and EDS Triteia from the University of California, San Diego.
The competition consists of four ground tournaments, a lunar derby and a deep space derby and offers an opportunity for the final three teams to launch their Cubesats onboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft as part of the Exploration Mission-1, which is scheduled to launch in 2018.
NASA will select the three winning teams for the EM-1 flight during the challenge’s final ground tournament to be held in February and will subject the three teams to a safety review prior to the first unmanned lunar flyby mission.
The Cube Quest Challenge is part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program.
