SpaceIL moon lander, A critical step closer to touchdown
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SpaceIL moon lander, A critical step closer to touchdown
A tiny robotic spacecraft from Israel just inserted itself into orbit around the Moon in a critical maneuver that sets the vehicle up for a landing on the lunar surface next week. If the touchdown is successful, the spacecraft will become the first private vehicle to land on the Moon.
The lander now speeding around the Moon is Beresheet, which is built and operated by Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL. On February 21st, Beresheet launched to space on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which deployed the lander in a wide orbit around Earth. Since then, the spacecraft has been periodically igniting its engine and stretching its orbital path around the planet, sending itself toward the Moon. So far, the lander has traveled more than 3.4 million miles through space and completed around 12 orbits. It’s also taken a few snapshots of Earth and itself along the way.
Just after 10:15AM ET this morning, Beresheet ignited its main engine again in order to slow the vehicle down so that it could be captured by the Moon’s gravity. Now, the lander is in an elliptical orbit around the Moon, a path that takes the spacecraft between 310 and 6,213 miles above the lunar surface. Beresheet won’t linger in this orbit for long, though. Over the next week, the lander will ignite its engine a few times to make its orbit around the Moon more circular, descending to 124 miles above the lunar surface. On April 11th, Beresheet will ignite its engine again to take itself out of the Moon’s orbit and land.
Today’s maneuver was a critical one for SpaceIL. If the lander hadn’t slowed down enough, it might have missed the Moon’s orbit altogether, and it may have even left the Earth-Moon system. That would have effectively ended the mission, as there was no way to get the vehicle back on track.
A successful landing next week will mark a major first for space travel because of the way Beresheet was developed. Even now, the fact that it’s orbiting the Moon is a major first for spaceflight history. Up until now, only three superpowers — the US, Russia, and China — have successfully landed vehicles intact on the Moon. Beresheet was created with mostly private funding. The team had an overall budget of just $90 million, but only $2 million of that came from the Israeli government; the rest came from private investors.
Such an achievement was the ultimate goal of the now-dead Google Lunar X Prize competition, a global race to put the first private vehicle on the Moon and lower the cost of deep space travel. SpaceIL was one of five finalists in that competition, which ended without a winner when none of the teams launched before the X Prize’s deadline of March 31st, 2018. If anyone had made it to the Moon by the deadline, X Prize would have awarded them a grand prize of $20 million.
However, SpaceIL is poised to receive some money if it makes it to the Moon. The X Prize Foundation announced last week that it will give the Israeli nonprofit a surprise $1 million award if Beresheet successfully touches down on the surface in one piece, upping the stakes slightly for the landing.
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This is a great event for both Israel 🇮🇱 and for private for profit capitalist companies in space exploration.
LOL. Israeli wine, I hope.
From space, the Earth has the same colours as the Israeli flag - I wonder about the significance of that.
Blues, whites and browns? the brown in the "selfie" is most likely the Sahara...
Ah, yes, now that I looked hard enough I could see a small brownish spot.
The moon's far side with Earth in the background, in a photo just taken by Beresheet.
And another photo of the far side...
Moon rise, my ass...
LOL. Until recently, who knows, that could have been the other side of the moon.
Space is getting crowded. Israel, and now Japan blowing up astroids and China landing on the dark side of the moon. Soon we'll need traffic lights and cops directing space traffic.
The universe is pretty big, and who knows, maybe our universe is just one of many, and the many make up just a little bit of an even greater universe, and so on. Makes one feel a little small and insignificant, doesn't it. As for getting crowded, Ellie Arroway in the 1997 movie "Contact" put it this way:
Sadly, something went wrong at the critical moment.
While it was supposed to be slowing down for a soft landing,
SplaceIL briefly lost touch with Barasheet and it was last reported 500 feet above the surface descending at 300mph.
It crashed joining 39 Russian failed probes and landers (out of 59 attempts),
13 American failures ( out of 47 attempts ),
1 Chinese failure in 8 flights,
and 1 Japanese failure in 5 attempts.
Only India and the EU are 1 for 1 successes.
SpaceIL and Marris Kahn are already raising money for a second attempt.
Hopefully they know what went wrong and will make sure it doesn't happen again. Maybe there wasn't enough fuel.