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By David Freeman
NASA has published a series of photographs showing the site of the Israeli lander Beresheet at the site of the Israeli assault, which crashed into the lunar surface on April 11 after a malfunction caused the premature stopping of its descent engine.
The black and white photos include "before" and "after" images of the accident site, located in a vast lava field called the sea of serenity on the lunar face. The photos were released Wednesday by the space agency.
An "after" photo, taken 11 days after the accident, shows a dark spot of about 10 meters to where the four-legged spaceship the size of a machine to to wash has cracked. No trail is visible on a "before" photo taken in 2016 – just an abundance of craters of varying size.
The photos were taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of NASA, a spacecraft equipped with a camera that bypasses the moon since 2009. LRO photographed the crash site at an altitude of 90 km above the lunar surface .
When he arrived, Beresheet was traveling about 1,000 meters per second (more than 2,200 km / h) faster than expected, said in a blog, Mark Geological, a geologist at the University of Arizona and principal investigator of the system. LRO imaging.
Designed and built by SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit organization, this $ 100 million lander was to be the first privately funded spacecraft to land softly on the moon. Until now, the only spacecraft to have landed on the moon have been those built by the United States, Russia and China.
Despite the crash, SpaceIL does not give up. In one video posted on Twitter on April 13, the billionaire's founder of the non-profit association, Morris Kahn, has announced plans to build a new lunar lander: "We will put him on the moon and carry out the mission."
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