A seemingly simple challenge stumped four teams of engineers competing Saturday to be the first to build a robot capable of collecting 330 pounds of lunar soil in less than 30 minutes.

The Regolith Excavation Challenge landed in Santa Maria, where inventors sought to grab a $250,000 prize offered by NASA to the team that had the right stuff.

But the strict parameters - machines also could use only 30 watts of power and had to weigh less than 88 pounds as they excavated the simulated moon dirt - defeated the competitors. Two other teams dropped out before even landing at the competition.

Despite the outcome, robots ruled the day at what initially may have appeared to be a Star Trek convention - cardboard standups of characters including Mr. Spock and Capt. Kirk greeted visitors - at the Santa Maria Fairpark.

The event drew a host of amateur inventors from across the nation, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin and LEGO-whiz kids from the Central Coast. The California Space Education and Workforce Institute - an arm of the Santa Maria-based California Space Authority - administered the challenge for NASA.

For Jim Greenhaw of Arroyo Grande, the challenge involved more than just moving the soil from a sandbox to an adjacent container. It also presented a philosophical question: How do you prepare for something without having any idea how, or if, it will work?

“It's pretty difficult,” said Matt Everingham, special projects manager with the California Space Authority in Santa Maria. “The material is supposed to mimic the sand of the moon,” which is pretty hard to get your hands on Earth.

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The material used Saturday is technically called “JSC-1A” but it's actually volcanic matter ground up to match the particle size of the moon dust, Everingham said. It's heavier and smoother than normal sand, he added.

“We know that the machines had mechanical problems and that prevented them from reaching the threshold,” said Wil Simon, spokesman for CSA. “No one achieved the 5-kilogram per minute excavation rate needed to move 150 kilograms in 30 minutes.”

Even Simon admitted that the criteria is a “major threshold.”

For nearly 30 days straight, Greenhaw created an excavation machine that did well lifting sand and clay. Somehow the machine only managed to lift roughly 150 pounds of JSC-1A. He blames the competition criteria.

“No matter how efficient your machine is, the criteria of the challenge makes it almost impossible,” he said. He added that he wasn't “devastated that I didn't win.”

At least on that side of the convention center, egos didn't seem to be at stake. Instead, much of the spirit seemed harmonious as some took pictures of each others' machines and even exchanged business cards.

The same couldn't be said on the kid's side, where competition in the RoboChallenge was fierce.

Nearly 76 young inventors from Arroyo Grande, Lompoc, Santa Maria, Guadalupe, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara put their mechanized Lego robots to a series of challenges including sumo wrestling, tugs-of-war and self-guiding over a line. The robots in the latter challenge eventually strayed off and circled in confusion, causing the young crowd to go ballistic.

“Oh, he really gets into it,” Andy Garcia said about his son David Garcia, 11.

David, along with George Beas, also 11 and from Guadalupe, placed first in the sumo-remote competition for kindergartners to fifth-graders.

“It seems like every time robotics competitions come around, the Legos come out of the box,” said Andy Garcia.

Neither of David's parents are engineers, but his mother Rosie Garcia says he picked up robotics as a hobby from his older brothers. Now, she says, the interest he puts in robotics appears to have spilled over to other academic areas such as math and music.

And that's the goal of the youth competition, says Tino Aleman, RoboChallenge judge and teacher at Mary Buren Elementary in Guadalupe.

With robotics, he said, “they become interested in engineering, science and math.” The goal is to get those students, especially minority students, to stay in school and pursue a further education, he added.

Luis Ernesto Gomez can be reached at 739-2218,

or lgomez@santamariatimes.com

May 13, 2007