If successful, Israel will be the fourth country to achieve a soft-landing on the moon.
AN ISRAELI MOON MISSION involving a privately built spacecraft is underway, with that country now poised to be the fourth to land an object on the lunar surface.
The country’s space program, SpaceIL, which was founded in December 2010, partnered with the Weizmann Institute of Science and the University of California Los Angeles to take measurements of the moon’s “mysterious” magnetic field. The spacecraft, named Beresheet, was launched Thursday evening from Cape Canaveral in Florida aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Beresheet is scheduled to land on the moon on April 11. Its destination is an area within Mare Serenitatis on the northern hemisphere of the moon, a site that SpaceIL says has “magnetic anomalies.” Landing there will allow the spacecraft to take measurements of the moon’s magnetic field.
Beresheet is scheduled to orbit the Earth three times. “At the right timing,” officials say, the craft will enter the moon’s orbit and circle it twice. Israel’s space program has seven ground stations across the globe that will enable communication with Beresheet.
Aiming to make a soft landing on the moon, Israel would join the Soviet Union and U.S., which accomplished the feat in 1966, and China, which did it in 2013. The Soviet Union was first to the moon in 1959 with a hard-landing, when a spacecraft crashes rather than achieves a controlled descent. The U.S. achieved a hard landing in 1962.
According to CNN, if Beresheet is successful, it will be the smallest spacecraft to soft-land on the moon. It will also be the first mission by a private enterprise. Raised from donations, the mission received $100 million.