Milestone awards were given in to teams who in the last year demonstrated exception technological achievement in the three categories of landing, mobility and imaging.A landing award scored teams $1 million, while a mobility prize as worth $500,000 and imaging prize was worth $250,000.
Milestone awards were available in each of those three categories.the Lander System Milestone Prize to demonstrate hardware and software that enables a soft-landing on the moon.the Mobility Subsystem Milestone Prize to demonstrate a mobility system that allows the craft to move 500 meters after landing and the Imaging Subsystem Milestone Prize for producing “Mooncasts” consisting of high-quality images and video on the lunar surface.
Astrobotic aimed to deliver affordable space robotics technology and missions for a new era of planetary exploration, science, tourism, resource utilization and mining. The company was established in 2014 as a spin-off from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute. The team’s lander has a mass of more than half a metric ton and is about the size of a small SUV. It will release a rover about the size of a go-cart. The team’s rover will explore a lunar skylight thought to be an entrance to a subsurface cave network.
