Israel’s new lunar mission

Israel has set its eyes once again on landing a craft on the Moon.

 Israel’s new lunar mission

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• The story: SpaceIL, the nonprofit Israeli initiative whose spacecraft crashed on the moon two years ago, said it has secured $70 million in funding to make a second attempt at a lunar landing. The first "Beresheet" or "Genesis spacecraft" crashed into the moon moments before touchdown in April 2019.
• Details: SpaceIL said the new pledges means that it has raised almost all of the 100 million it estimates is needed for the mission to meet its 2024 launch target. It said the funding would come from South African Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn, who bankrolled much of the first mission, French Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi and South African philanthropist Martin Moshal, cofounder of venture capital firm Entree Capital.
• Why the first crashed: The spacecraft had suffered a string of technical malfunctions. That included damage to the star trackers, a type of navigation tool, failure of computer systems and engine failure.
• A big plan: The new mission, to be called “Beresheet 2”, was announced in late 2020 and plans to set new global space records through a double landing on the moon and the installment of the lightest ever moon landers, each weighing 60 kg without fuel. It will be composed of three spacecraft — an orbiter and two landers — with the mission hoping to follow China in becoming only the second to successfully land on the far side of the moon. The orbiter, known as the mothership, is set to remain in space for years serving as a platform for educational science activities through a remote connection that allows students from around the world to participate in deep-space research.
• Knowledge centre:

1. Moon landings - A total of twelve men have landed on the Moon. The first human-made object to touch the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2, on 13 September 1959. The United States' Apollo 11 was the first crewed mission to land on the Moon, on 20 July 1969. All soft landings took place on the near side of the Moon until 3 January 2019, when the Chinese Chang'e 4 spacecraft made the first landing on the far side. Indian Space Research Organization launched Chandrayaan-2 on 22 July 2019 with landing scheduled on 6 September 2019. But at an altitude of 2.1 km from the Moon a few minutes before soft landing, the lander lost contact and crashed. Many conspiracists say the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax but empirical evidence is available to show that human Moon landings did occur.
2. Moon - Earth's natural satellite, the Moon, was formed about 4.51 billion years ago, just after Earth, out of the debris from a giant impact between the planet and a possibly Mars-sized body called "Theia". The near side of the Moon is marked by dark volcanic maria ("seas"), which fill the spaces between bright ancient crustal highlands and prominent impact craters. The lunar surface is relatively non-reflective, but because it has a large angular diameter, the full moon is the brightest celestial object in the night sky. Isotope dating of lunar samples suggests the Moon formed around 50 million years after the origin of the Solar System. The Moon is the second-densest satellite in the Solar System, after Io.

 

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