"It also seems the cost of hardware (HD cameras, still cameras, video transmission hardware...) and getting there would eat up a bunch of that prize money." Kenneth - N5VHO

I see some huge obstacles that would need to be overcome before an undertaking like this could be even considered. Then again, amateurs are well known for being able to overcome obstacles set before them.

The first obstacle I see is whether you can land the craft on the moon, perform necessary diagnostics and then complete all the required tasks during a single lunar day (14.5 days on earth). More specifically you should be aiming for completing the tasks in the early part of the lunar day when the sun is at a low angle. Temperatures vary from 138C during the peak of the lunar day to -153C during the dead of lunar night. I don't even want to think about a temperature swing 14 days long with a variation of ~290C. (I'd stay away from aiming for that $5Million bonus based on surviving lunar night and just say that if it happens then we surpassed our own expectations)

The second obstacle is the selection of individual components. What electrical storage device (NiCd, NiMH, LiIon, Capacitors, etc) are you going to use that will survive the temperature and hard vacuum of the moon? What capacitors, resistors, IC's and other components are going to be durable enough to perform? The vacuum present on the moon is many times greater than that present at Low Earth Orbit, so great that there are few vacuum chambers on earth that can even come close (10e-15 atm or 7.6 × 10e-12 torr). At this level of vacuum plastics & rubbers degrade fairly fast due to outgassing, this includes the materials that our components would be made from. I'm sure AMSAT has engineers that handle component selection based upon environmental conditions (or lack of environment, hi hi) but it's still something to take into account.

The mooncast that is required for receiving the grand prize includes transmission of High Definition video from the moon to be received here on earth. Even if we aimed to provide the lowest of the HDTV resolutions (720p) we're looking at a real-time data rate of 7-15MBps. I think this part of the requirement is feasible only because there's no requirement for the video to be transmitted in real-time, so we could theoretically store the video locally and retransmit it at a lower data rate. (Anyone want to discuss data rate vs. required RF bandwidth? Available frequency bands, or the square inverse law and the power necessary to get the signal to earth?)

There is a separate requirement for near real-time video but it doesn't specify that it has to be in color nor does it specify a frame rate. Wonder if they'd consider a black & white stream at 2 or 4 frames per second to be "video".

The 360 degree panorama of still photographs could be taken with the same camera that's being used for the HD transmission. Just pull stills at specified intervals as the camera and / or craft does a 360 on the surface.

In order to cut this post short and summarize my opinion, yes I think that the goal is attainable and within the realm of possibility considering the experience that the various AMSAT teams possess but it would monumental even compared to the launch and operation of Eagle.

Ric Letson, NB2E nb2e@amsat.org