Thursday, April 11, 2019

Israel: Space mission to the moon fails

(Yehud) A private Israeli attempt to land on the moon. Faield this evening, when the Israeli  SpaceIL's control centre lost communications with the Beresheet spacecraft, when it was about 489 feet (149 meters) above the moon's surface resulting in it crashing into the moon. The mission which was built and launched on the cheap after the nonprofit organization SpaceIL was formed to compete in the Google Lunar X Prize. The GLXP offered $20 million to the first privately funded team to put a robot down softly on the moon, move it at least 1,650 feet (500 meters) on the lunar surface and have it send high-resolution imagery home to Earth. Whilst google closed down the competition  SpaceIL continued and in February piggybacked a ride on a SpaceX mission in which to get their spacecraft to the Moon. Unfortunately as mentioned above the mission failed, but the company is already looking at trying again.