The Google Lunar X PRIZE is a compititon, founded by Peter H. Diamandis (X PRIZE Founder) and Sergey Brin (Google Co-Founder), intended to increase interest in space exploration. By creating this compitition, the founders hope to incite intrest in a luner space race between private orginizations around the world. The incentive to preticipate in this compitition is a grand prize of $20 million for the first orginization to saftly land a craft on the moon that roams for a minimum of 500 meters and transmits a "mooncast" back to earth. This "mooncast" must be composed of 360 degree photos of the lunar surface, pictures of the rover on the moon, next to real time HD video of the crafts journey on the moon, and a saved piece of data loaded on the craft bfor launch"e.g. first email from the moon". These "mooncasts" must me transmited when the craft first lands on the moon and again whie the craft is roaming the moon's surface. This prize is offered untill December 31st 2012, at witch point the prize will drop to $15 million which will be offered untill December 31st 2014. If no orginization has won by then then the compition will end unless it is extended by Google or the X PRIZE orginization. There is also a $5 million prize offered unitl December 31st 2014 for a second place contender. On top of the main prize, there is also another $5 million worth of prize money offered for various other goals acomplished while the craft is on the moon's surface. They include things like roaming over 5000 meters, discovering ice/water on the moon's surface, finding things left by man on the moon, or surviving the lunar night.

            We plan to design our robot to preform in all the main challange tasks as well as two of the auxiliary tasks. The two auxiliary tasks that we plan to design for are surviving the lunar night and roaming over 5000 meters. We plan to design the craft to be able to survie the lunar night for the practical reason that we may need more time to complete the main tasks and the carft may need to suvive the lunar night. Because we are designing a durable craft that can survive the lunar night and last a while on the moon than we inharently are going for the other goal of roaming over 5000 meters because the craft will be operable.