With this being Passion Week and the start of Passover approaching, it’s impossible to ignore Israel and the history of its Jewish people. The nation of Israel is an unlikely success story given its size. Yet, it is given the fact that it has lost it’s land at least twice and regained it.
Many of the great military, scientific, medical, art, and intellectual minds over the ages have been Jewish. Albert Einstein, King David, Jonas Salk, Stan Lee, Joshua, and no doubt a Former Carpenter from Nazareth (but born in Bethlehem) that took on Teaching and Healing. Related to the latter one, it is most well known for two great and related faiths . . . Judaism and Christianity.
Artist’s rendition of the Beresheet ?? lander.
Now alongside these accolades, Israel has finally laid claim to dedicated deep space exploration, namely with a specialized lander built as a contestant in the Lunar XPrize competition . . . Beresheet.
The name בראשית is pronounced “Beresheet” and is roughly translated from Hebrew to English to mean “Genesis” or “In the Beginning”, as is written in the Torah and the Bible’s Old Testament. Beresheet was the first Israeli spacecraft to travel beyond Earth’s orbit and is the first privately funded landing on the Moon.
Run by Israeli non-profit SpaceIL, the mission was funded mostly by private donors because of the requirements of the Google Lunar X Prize, which offered a cash prize to the first venture not funded by a government to land on the moon but ended without a winner in January 2018. SpaceIL’s Mission is to promote STEM and Space exploration along with related academics.
The co-founders of the team were Yariv Bash, former electronics and computer engineer in the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, and currently Flytrex CEO; Kfir Damari, a Computer Networking lecturer and entrepreneur; and Yonatan Winetraub, formerly a satellite systems engineer at Israel Aerospace Industries and currently a biophysics Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University.
In November 2017, SpaceIL announced that they needed US$30 million to finish the project. The amount required was produced by a few major donors. According to Israel Aerospace Industries, the project had cost approximately US$100 million.
The time capsule on the upper right contained electronic copies of the historic documents and Israeli children’s’ drawings.
The spacecraft carried a “time capsule” created by the Arch Mission Foundation, containing over 30 million pages of analog and digital data, including a full copy of the English-language Wikipedia, the Wearable Rosetta disc, the PanLex database, the Torah, children’s drawings, a children’s book inspired by the space launch, memoirs of a Holocaust survivor, Israel’s national anthem (Hatikvah), the Israeli flag, and a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Its scientific payload included a magnetometer supplied by the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science to measure the local magnetic field, and a laser retroreflector array supplied by NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center to enable precise measurements of the Earth-Moon distance.
The spacecraft featured one LEROS 2b liquid-propellant, restartable rocket engine, using monomethylhydrazine (MMH) fuel and mixed oxides of nitrogen (MON) as an oxidizer. This single engine was used to reach lunar orbit, as well as for deceleration and propulsive landing.
The Beresheet mission included plans to measure the Moon’s magnetic field at the landing site and carried a laser retroreflector, and the afore-mentioned “time capsule”.
It used seven ground stations, globally, for Earth-lander communication. Its Mission Control room is at Israel Aerospace Industries in Yehud, Israel.
The SpaceIL entry was unique among GLXP contenders, in that instead of building a tracked or wheeled rover, SpaceIL planned to meet the requirement to travel 500 meters (1,600 ft.) on the lunar surface by having the lander “hop” using rocket engine propulsion from its landing site to another site more than 500 meters away.
In October 2015, SpaceIL signed a contract for a launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, via Spaceflight Industries. By January 2019, testing was complete and the spacecraft was delivered to Cape Canaveral, Florida in preparation for launch on the launch vehicle.
It was launched on 22 February 2019 at 0145 UTC as a secondary payload, along with the telecom satellite PSN-6. Beresheet was controlled at its command center in Yehud, Israel.
From 24 February to 19 March, the main engine was used four times for orbit raising, putting its apogee close to the Moon’s orbital distance.
The spacecraft performed maneuvers so as to be successfully captured into an elliptical lunar orbit on 4 April 2019, and has adjusted its flight pattern in a circular orbit around the Moon. Once in the correct circular orbit, it was intended for the craft to decelerate for a soft landing on the lunar surface on 11 April 2019.
Beresheet planned landing site was to be the north part of the Mare Serenitatis, with a landing zone about 15 km (9.3 mi) in diameter. It is just to the upper right-hand corner of the center in a light blue circle.
Beresheet was to operate for an estimated two days on the lunar surface, as it had no thermal control and was expected to quickly overheat. However, its laser retroreflector was a passive device requiring no electrical power and was expected to be functional for several decades.
On 11 April 2019, at approximately 1900 UTC, the lander began its de-orbit and landing procedure. Within minutes before the expected landing, mission control received a “selfie” photograph from the probe with the lunar surface visible in the background. It had also performed the same actions with a photograph of Earth.
Beresheet took the photograph above shortly before the main landing attempt was made in the predefined landing area.
During the braking procedure on approach to the landing site, the craft’s main engine stopped operating. The engine was brought back online following a system reset; however, the craft had already lost too much altitude to slow its descent sufficiently.
This was the last photo taken by Beresheet before coming down. The spacecraft arrived at the surface of the moon, but at a speed and angle that did not allow for a soft landing. Having apparently crashed, communication with the lander ended. SpaceIL announced the failure at 1925 UTC. Final telemetry values on the mission control screens showed an altitude of 149 m (489 ft.), and horizontal and vertical velocities of 946.7 m/s (2,118 mph) and −134 m/s (−300 mph), respectively.
The control room gave a round of applause nonetheless, recognizing the tremendous achievement they still accomplished. With the flight of Beresheet, Israel became the seventh nation to orbit the Moon, and technically the fourth to land on its surface, though not in the way they had hoped for.
“The saying ‘failure is not an option’ is not true – we need to fail in order to learn,” says space consultant Laura Forczyk. “They failed in a way that still succeeded in a lot of their goals and in inspiring a lot of people.” And this will not be Israel’s first and last moonshot. “If at first, you don’t succeed, you try again,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from SpaceIL’s mission control in Yehud, Israel. “Israel will land on the moon.”
The X Prize Foundation announced in March that it would still give SpaceIL $1 million if Beresheet landed successfully. But after the crash, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis tweeted that SpaceIL would still be given the $1 million prize to continue their work.
Even more notably, two days after the failed attempt to soft land on the Moon, SpaceIL announced plans for a second attempt, Beresheet-2. They are also contemplating the possibility of building several commercial landers. Beresheet is also to be a demonstrator of a small robotic lunar lander.
Israel has finally joined the international ranks of the moon and deep space exploration. The mission was an almost complete success, and enough of the success to give them and the rest the world high confidence that they have what it takes to be able to explore and learn about space and it’s related science with an expanding capability.
To learn more, please visit SpaceIL, and the Israeli Space Agency websites for more information.
For The Great Galactic Space Gimmick, I’m Gimmick Commander Ben Faltinowski. ?????
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