Israeli team investigates "chain of events" in lunar crash

The Israeli start-up behind the failure of last week's lunar landing said Thursday that she was still investigating a malfunction that had caused the probe to fall onto the surface of the moon.

SpaceIL, the non-profit organization that undertook the lunar mission, said engineers under mission control had received a malfunction notification in the inertial measurement unit of the machine , an essential part of its guidance system, during the final descent of the LG.

The team issued an activation command, which triggered a "chain of events" that resulted in the main engine failure of the spacecraft, throwing it against the Moon.

"We need to enter and understand the technical details in more depth, but that's the sequence that has happened in telemetry," SpaceIL general manager Ido Anteby told reporters.

"We have no assumptions about why this error occurred," he said.

SpaceIL said it would continue to analyze the flight data to determine the cause of the fatal problem and publish a formal assessment in the coming weeks.

The moonshot, the first of a privately-funded enterprise, sought to make Israel the fourth country to land on the moon, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and China.

SpaceIL was founded in 2011 and originally competed for Google's Lunar Xprize, a $ 20 million challenge that private companies must attempt to reach on the moon. But the competition was abandoned by the technology giant in 2018 when none of the five companies managed to reach a predetermined deadline.

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