Get Your Cube Quest Challenge Entries Ready!

Registration for NASA’s Cube Quest (CQ) Challenge opens on December 2, 2014.  Prizes are offered for putting a cubesat into stable lunar orbit or for communicating the most amount of data in certain time frames or for the longest period of time or from the greatest distance in cis-lunar or trans-lunar space.

The CQ Challenge is part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program and has a total prize purse of $5 million.

Prizes will be awarded for:

• putting a cubesat into a stable lunar orbit
• communicating the largest amount of data from the lunar distance in
  • a 30 minute time frame and
  • in a 28 day time frame
• communicating the largest amount of data from 4 million kilometers from Earth
  • in a 30 minute time frame and
  • in a 28 day time frame
• for being the last cubesat communicating and
• for communicating from the furthest distance from Earth

The opening of registration for this challenge is announced in the November 24, 2014 Federal Register (distributed electronically on November 22), which directs interested individuals to a website that, as of the time of publication of this article (8:30 am November 22), is not working [http://www.nasa.gov/cubequest].  Presumably it will be working by the time registration opens on December 2.  Until then, the main website for the Centennial Challenges program may be helpful, though this particular competition does not seem to be posted there yet, either.

The competition ends one year after the “NASA-provided launch opportunity is launched for the challenge.”