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Apr 15, 2019 · The added fuel requirements of this approach killed plans for the water-bottle-size probe, so blueprints for a 1,314-lb. (596 kilograms), smart-car-size, four-legged lander took their place ...
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A successful touchdown would have made Israel the fourth country to pull off a lunar landing. Despite the crash, the mission is still significant.
On April 11, an Israeli lander named after the Hebrew word for “Genesis” attempted to mark a new beginning for space exploration by becoming the first privately funded spacecraft to touch down on the moon. Built by the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL, the Beresheet lander tried to softly land within Mare Serenitatis, a vast volcanic basin on the moon's northern near side—but as it made its descent, the spacecraft's main engine failed. Engineers reset the spacecraft but lost communications, and the 330-pound lander ultimately crashed.
On April 12, SpaceIL released preliminary data from the last few moments of the mission, which show that despite resetting Beresheet, the spacecraft was descending at more than 300 miles an hour while it was less than 500 feet from touchdown, leading to “the inevitable collision with the lunar surface.”
“We didn’t make it, but we definitely tried, and I think the achievement of getting to where we got is pretty tremendous,” Morris Kahn, SpaceIL's primary funder and president, said during a livestream of the attempt. “I think we can be proud ... you win some, you lose some.”
A successful touchdown would have made Israel the fourth country to pull off a soft lunar landing, and SpaceIL would have become the first entity primarily funded by private donors to land a spacecraft on another world. The lander was carrying two scientific instruments and a digital time capsule that included a “lunar library.”
Despite the hard landing, the mission is a milestone: Beresheet is the closest a private entity has come so far to landing on the lunar surface. And on April 4, the spacecraft successfully entered orbit around the moon—making Israel just the seventh country ever to accomplish that feat.
Left:
On April 4, 2019, Beresheet entered orbit around the moon, taking this picture of the moon's far side from an altitude of 292 miles.
Right:
From more than 225,000 miles away, Earth appears as just a bright dot in the background in this image taken by Beresheet.
Photographs by Eliran Avital
Initially, the SpaceIL team dreamed of landing a spacecraft on the moon by the end of 2012, with a lander weighing no more than a few pounds. But when briefed on the nonprofit's plans, the Israel Space Agency and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the country's primary defense contractor, cautioned SpaceIL that its plans were only half-baked.
Now that SpaceIL has made its landing attempt, the organization is set to “self destruct”; the nonprofit's existence had been centered on Beresheet alone. Bash says that the group will decide on its long-term plans in the coming weeks. In the meantime, IAI has teamed up with the German firm OHB to offer the European Space Agency rides for its moon-bound instruments.
While SpaceIL is the first private entity to get this far with a moon landing, it certainly won't be the last, and those that follow will have a far more commercial bent. As interest grows in moving industry—maybe even people—off world, many new companies, including some former Lunar XPrize competitors, are angling to become the pillars of a new lunar economy.
“It's ridiculously hard, but it's getting more reasonable to aspire to,” says Bob Richards, CEO of Moon Express, a former finalist in the Google Lunar XPrize. “It'll be transformational. I see the democratization of access to the moon and deep space happening now, in the same way that CubeSats have democratized access to low-Earth orbit.”
NASA is helping fan the industry's flames, just as it did when it offered contracts to private companies to send supplies, and eventually astronauts, to the International Space Station. In April 2018, it announced the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, offering contracts to private companies to take NASA scientific instruments to the moon. In November 2018, NASA approved nine bidders, including former Lunar XPrize competitors Moon Express and Astrobotic, to compete for the agency's contracts. Barbara Cohen, a planetary scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, says that the program will provide a welcome return to the lunar surface for U.S. science after a four-decade absence.
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After three failed launches, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk scraped together enough funding to launch a fourth version of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket. On September 28, 2008, Musk's gamble paid off when the Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to orbit Earth . The rocket is seen here lifting off from the Reagan Test Site in the Marshall Islands.
After three failed launches, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk scraped together enough funding to launch a fourth version of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket. On September 28, 2008, Musk's gamble paid off when the Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to orbit Earth. The rocket is seen here lifting off from the Reagan Test Site in the Marshall Islands.
Photograph from NASA
“Orbital measurements are awesome, we're really happy with our orbital campaign, not just with LRO [the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter] but with GRAIL and LADEE and ARTEMIS, and a whole suite of spacecraft—but we have a lot of unanswered questions that we need lunar access to address,” she says.
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Moon lander; Landing date: Lunar capture: 4 April 2019 Landing: 11 April 2019 (failure) Landing site: Mare Serenitatis
- 585 kg
- 22 February 2019, 01:45 UTC
- 48 days, 17 hours, 38 minutes (achieved)
- Falcon 9 B5
Feb 22, 2019 · Before and after comparison of the landing site created with Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images. It appears the spacecraft landed from the north on the rim of a small crater, about a few meters wide, leaving a dark "smudge" on Mare Serenitatis that’s elongated towards the south.
Feb 13, 2019 · The Google Lunar X-Prize, announced in 2007, required a safe landing on the Moon by the end of 2014, sending high definition images and video, and traveling 500 meters on the lunar surface, and the first lander to succeed would win the first prize of $20 million, with smaller prizes awarded to the second place finisher as well as teams that ...
Mar 20, 2019 · published 20 March 2019. It should reach lunar orbit on April 4. The Israeli lunar lander Beresheet, which launched to Earth orbit on Feb. 21, performed a 60-second engine firing on March...
