Japan’s Hakuto snags $500k milestone award from Google’s Lunar Xprize challenge

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Asia’s space race has never reached the same heated pitch as the contest between the US and Russia, but countries in the region still take pride in their respective celestial feats. In recent years, China landed a rover on the moon and India sent an orbiter to Mars. Today, Japan added a feather to its own cap with the announcement that a domestic team, Hakuto, is one of five teams to receive prize money from Google’s Lunar Xprize challenge.

The team will get US$500,000 as a milestone prize in the mobility category. This means that the lunar rover they are developing shows significant promise that it will actually move properly once it gets to the moon.

Hakuto, led by Tohoku University professor Kazuya Yoshida, is the only Japanese representative in the 18-team private sector race to land a rover on the moon. Yoshida might be a familiar name for space buffs as his team developed Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft which pulled off the nifty – and stunning – trick of landing on an asteroid, collecting samples, and returning to earth.

Hakuto is competing for the US$20 million purse awarded to the first team to land a robot on the moon, move 500 meters, and stream HD mooncasts, all with 10 percent or less government funding. Securing the milestone prize is an excellent sign, but America’s Astrobotic took home US$1.75 million in prize money by winning milestone awards in the landing and imaging categories as well. The final deadline for all teams is December 31, 2016.

See: This Singapore startup, led by a Japanese entrepreneur, wants to remove killer litter from space