The basic Ye-8 was deigned to soft land on the Moon and deliver an automatic, self-propelled lunar vehicle, Lunokhod, for purposes of surveying sites for later manned landings and lunar bases. It was also intended that the spacecraft would provide a radio homing beacon for precision landings of later manned spacecraft. The design had its origins in Korolev�s L2 project of 1963. This evolved within OKB-1 to the globular Ye-8 of 1965 before further development of unmanned planetary spacecraft was passed to the Lavochkin bureau. There the design was refined and modified for a single launch by a Proton launch vehicle. By the time the spacecraft flew, America had won the manned moon race and mission objectives were to collect images of the lunar surface, examine ambient light levels to determine the feasibility of astronomical observations from the Moon, perform laser ranging experiments from Earth, observe solar X-rays, measure local magnetic fields, and study mechanical properties of the lunar surface material.