Google Lunar XPrize: Rovers on the beach with Team Hakuto in Japan

[MUSIC] Welcome to the moon, or as close to the moon as you can get here in Japan. We're on the sand dunes just outside of Hamamatsu, where Steve Hakutov is testing the rovers. Yes, they have two rovers to test in the mobility test. The larger one called Moon Raker is a four wheeled rover which tows behind it a two wheeled guy. Called Tetris. The idea is that Moon Raker will back up to a skylight on the moon, a cavern formed by lava, and drops Tetris down within. After landing, we send a signal from the ground station, then envelope should open. And then Rover should go out from the envelope. Then touch on the surface of the moon. This portion of Terrestrial Mazlin prizes are designed for the team to show Google Lunar X prize and the X Prize Foundation that they have actually created hardware that is on a path for launching. My name is John Walker, I'm the rover development leader for team [UNKNOWN]. You can see the camera here and this is an off the shelf camera for industrial use pointed straight up. And so there's also on top of the rover a [UNKNOWN] mirror so the camera can see a three sixty degree image all the way around. This is the operator console, where we get the live raw image that we can see in front of the rover, to the right and behind. My name is Nathan Britton. I'm one of the engineers on the team. I'll show you a spot turn. We're gonna turn 30 degrees to the right. The weather at the moment is quite nice but for the test itself it was actually pretty bad. But that didn't stop a scrum of Japanese reporters from coming out and filming the event. This is a [UNKNOWN] space, a nice space for us to demonstrate the our mobilities. Our final goal is to contribute to the science. The [UNKNOWN] underground surface of the moon is really cosmetic. Today that we know that there are several holes and, if possible, our rover should go down into the hole. The cap is supposed to be the base for, in the future, so we are going to explore the cap in order to identify the cap if is visible for the future date. So then fast we complete the 500m travel and approach into the. A hole, each of the hole than out in ocean, we use this [UNKNOWN] system to make em underground exploration. The judges are not quite willing to commit to saying whether the team was successful but things certainly looked good from where we stand. The milestone phase of the Google Lunar XPRIZE is over. The next step is the moon. We're still waiting to find out which team will get to the moon first and win that $20 million dollar prize. Certainly, we'll be there to cover it when it happens. Whether we win the XPRIZE or not, we gonna, continue to our,. journey. I'm Kim Stephens from CNet covering the the Google Lunar Xprize. [MUSIC]