The world's hunger for exploration, both bodily and extraterrestrial, is dwarfed only by its hunger for entertainment. With a prize of $20 million--nearly half the Robotics Institute's annual budget--the Google X-Prize is an opportunity CMU's researchers can't pass up.

To win it, they'll have to transport a rover to the moon and send back a series of transmissions, the most difficult of which will be high-definition video of the lunar surface. Hence the dish atop this X-Prize prototype, which can rotate on a gimbal to track Earth and keep its video transmitting clearly.