NASA announced two new cash prizes Friday , each with a weighty $250,000 purse, in a pair of contests aimed at developing robotic systems for space exploration.

The space agency is challenging innovators to build an autonomous aerial vehicle to navigate a tricky flight path or robots capable of building complex structures with only limited guidance from their human handlers, NASA officials said.

The contests – dubbed the Planetary Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Telerobotic Construction challenges, respectively – are part of the agency’s Centennial Challenges program to spur interest in commercializing space technologies. Both challenges will make their competitive debut in 2007, NASA officials said.

“The Telerobotic Construction Challenge is directly linked to NASA’s focus on lunar exploration,” said Brant Sponberg, NASA’s Centennial Challenges program manager, in a statement.

Meanwhile, the aerial vehicle challenge may yield the same type of probes that could one day soar through the atmospheres of Mars and the Saturnian moon Titan, NASA officials said.

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Last prize award was for DARPA's autonomous vehicles. Unlike the previous fiasco, vehicles actually completed the course.