The Winner Is ...

The prize award ceremony will be an event unlike any other award ceremony. This has to be a mega-event crowning the "rovonauts of the Universe". The prize will be gold, silver and bronze medals, as given at Olympic games. Furthermore, the racetrack will be named after the winning team. We hope the public will accept the race as a fair, honest contest in both engineering expertise and physical endurance, thus respecting without prejudice a winning team from any country. The credo is to portray the Olympic spirit not only during the race but also in future human space exploration.

Teleoperation for the Public

After the race some rovers should still be functional for at least two days, even if they do not survive the lunar night. During that time some of them will be available for teleoperation by schools that have won "rovo-minutes" in the pre-race activities. Also, museums or entertainment complexes like Disney World could have the opportunity to allow visitors a short period of experiencing real rover teleoperation. Here, again, the public can experience the limited speed of light through a hands-on activity. As the rovers will be at the landing site of Apollo 17, there will be lots of visually interesting things to visit, not to forget the previously deployed space sculpture garden.

Educational and Academic Outreach

The participating teams will tour around the world to give lectures as well as question and answer sessions in schools, museums and universities. In this way, youth not only gets into direct contact with the "scientific heroes", but in addition to that the spirit of the race - that space concerns everybody and is part of everyone's future.

After the race, the website will be enhanced by any scientific results gained. This is not meant to justify the idea of a race on the Moon. The overall aim is still to have fun and to shape public awareness, but there will still be several unique opportunities to carry out scientific research during the race:

• There are the ten different camera-views of the same area provided by the rovers as well as the view of the media vehicle that can be post-processed and combined to a 3-D mapping of the lunar surface with unprecedented accuracy.
  
  
• During the whole race a scientific experiment will be carried out on the lander. The very nature of that experiment is to be defined via the contest in the pre-race phase.
   
• Material scientists can investigate by using rover cameras the long-duration exposure effects of the Apollo 17 artifacts to the lunar environment.
   
• The art "camerators" could analyze the material below the lunar surface, by using small geological probes.

The results of these experiments will be published on the web-site as well as in refereed scientific journals. Finally, a scientific documentary about the whole project could be created, similar to the Universum series by BBC. This would be addressed to an interested public without specific expert knowledge.

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