Google Moon project was initiated not for fun purpose only. Google is pretty serious about this space features and they finally decided to go to moon and build their own robot lunar rover. The mission is named Moon 2.0.

Google Moon is powered by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) which was a result of a Space Act Agreement signed by both parties in December 2006. Google is taking this step to the next level and decided to send their own robot with the help of a interested NASA team.

Google announced a contest for this lift up. A grand prize of $20 million will be awarded to the first team to do this task no later than Dec. 31, 2012. The second place award of $5 million will go to a second team that can complete this by Dec. 31, 2014. Bonuses of $5 million will be awarded for additional tasks. The announcement was made at Wired magazine’s NextFest tech conference in Los Angeles on Thursday, September 13th.

As a part of Google’s agreement with NASA, NASA recently provided Google Moon with some high quality Lunar Apollo 11 images, panoramic images, audio and video footage. The six missions (Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 & 17) of the Apollo Program, which lasted from 1963 to 1972, were the first and last times that Mankind has set foot on another world.

Here are some Google Moon features:

• Visible - A mosaic of images taken by the Clementine mission. This is a black-and-white version of what you would see if you were in orbit around the moon. This composite imagery was prepared by the USGS.
• Elevation - A lunar terrain map generated by the USGS in conjunction with the The Unified Lunar Control Network 2005, and shaded using an airbrushed shaded relief map. This map is color-coded by altitude, so you can use the color key at the lower left to estimate elevations.
• Apollo - A collection of placemarks that tell the story of the Apollo missions that landed on the moon. This includes stories, quotes, images, panoramas, audio clips, and links to videos of the astronauts’ adventures on the lunar surface.
• Charts - A collection of geological and topographic charts of various regions of the moon.