Boston (MA) - MIT announced today their "mystery team." It's a group of of engineers from MIT, an aerospace company and various small businesses with one goal in mind: to win the Google Lunar X-Prize competition and claim its $30 million award. The "Next Giant Leap" team, as it is being called - a play on Armstrong's famous "...one giant leap for mankind" speech, is comprised of MicroSat Systems, Draper Laboratory, Aurora Flight Sciences and Busek - a propulsion company.





The X-Prize requires a team launch from the Earth, reach the Moon, land safely on the surface and then have some part of the craft move at least 500 meters from touchdown while sending back high resolution video to the Earth.



Currently fourteen teams have registered for the competition which was announced over a year ago. MIT has kept their interest secret until yesterday, when they revealed the Next Giant Team.



Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Jeffrey Hoffman, a former astronaut who flew five missions on the Space Shuttle, along with David Miller who head's MIT's Sapce Systems Laboratory, also the designer of the SPHERES micro-satellite research project, will represent MIT in the quest. The companies mentioned above will provide financial support and additional intellectual fuel to complete the mix.



Hoffman said, "When approached to join the Next Giant Leap team, we thought it was an outstanding opportunity for our students to be exposed to several agile, cutting-edge companies in the space business while working on a very challenging project. We feel that this team has the right stuff to have a shot at capturing this very challenging prize."



The X-Prize Foundation is the brainchild of Peter Diamandis, who says "we feel they are a very strong team, with experienced participants, a strong academic partner, and several cutting-edge small space companies."

Google's Lunar X-Prize website can be found here.