As early as next year, Red Rover, a prototype robotic vehicle being built at Carnegie Mellon University, may be sending back stunning images and video from the moon. William Whittaker, the CMU professor whose driverless SUV triumphed on a course of urban and suburban roads in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Urban Challenge last year, is using the same technologies in the one-meter-wide moon-bot (left, at a CMU test site).

The CMU team is an early entrant in a contest funded by Google and administered by the X Prize Foundation; $20 million will go to the first privately funded team whose rover reaches the moon, travels 500 meters, and returns images and data to Earth. Whittaker has formed a company, Astrobotic Technology, and is working with Raytheon and the University of Arizona on precision landing technologies. Nine other teams are also readying entries; X Prize estimates that their efforts could cost between $15 million and $100 million each. Despite the expense--and the competition--Whittaker is confident. "We have superior software for things like position estimation, route planning, and perception to sense the terrain," he boasts. But he did not elaborate on where his team will get funding.