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Six weeks after the launch of Cape Canaveral, a privately funded Israeli probe arrived in orbit around the moon Thursday, setting the stage for the mission's final descent to the lunar surface on April 11.
Engineers at the Beresheet Mission Control Center in Israel confirmed the successful maneuver after the probe's radio telemetry showed that the main engine had been launched for about six minutes, slowing its speed enough to allow gravity to the moon to capture the probe in an elongated lunar orbit.
The Beresheet spacecraft fired its main engine at 14:18 GMT (10:18 am EDT) Thursday for the maneuver to set up or break the steering wheel orbiting the moon. If the probe had gone bad, Israeli officials said the spacecraft would have continued in the depths of space, ending the mission.
Mission controllers, officials and VIPs observed the data transmitted from the spacecraft to the Israeli control center showing that the engine was operating normally. A display indicating the total shift, or delta-V, from the engine's ignition was counted upward to reach 323,663 meters per second (724 mph).
The engine was designed to slow down the speed of the probe by 324 meters per second. Officials celebrated the result, making Israel the seventh country or international organization to place a spacecraft in orbit around the moon, after Russia, the United States, Japan, the European Space Agency, the China and India.
"After six weeks in space, we managed to overcome another critical step by entering the gravity of the moon," said Ido Anteby, CEO of SpaceIL, a non-profit organization founded in 2011 to manage the development of Beresheet. "This is another important achievement that our engineering team has achieved while demonstrating determination and creativity to find solutions to unforeseen problems. We still have a long way to go before the lunar landing, but I am confident that our team will complete the mission of landing on the first Israeli spacecraft on the Moon, which makes us all proud. "
Beresheet was to enter an elliptical or oval orbit between 500 and 10,000 km above the surface of the moon. Several other engine launches over the next week will place Beresheet in a 200 km (200 km) circular orbit in anticipation of the landing.
Beresheet lunar capture maneuver Thursday was also historic for the commercial space industry. The mission was designed, built and launched for about $ 100 million, and almost all of the funding comes from private donors and business investments.
"We did it! First lunar orbit spacecraft financed by private funds, "tweeted Yoav Landsman, deputy mission director of Beresheet at SpaceIL. "It's like being at the dawn of a new era of commercial space."
The Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn, born in South Africa, contributed 40 million dollars of his fortune to the project. Kahn, 89, was at the Beresheet Control Center in Israel for Thursday's critical maneuver.
"We have had support from all over the world," Kahn said Thursday. "NASA has recognized what we do and the world has recognized what we do. We are pioneering space. We show that a small country can really do an extraordinary job. "
But more perils remain ahead for Beresheet. His mission will end with a landing on April 11th – next Thursday – in the Mare Serenitatis region, or sea of serenity, in the upper right of the moon as seen from the Earth.
"After a difficult run, we set another Israeli record tonight and became the seventh country to orbit the moon," said Nimrod Sheffer, CEO of Israel Aerospace Industries, Beresheet's main contractor. "Even before the launch of Beresheet, it was already a national achievement that showed our revolutionary technological capabilities. Tonight we are reaching new heights again. In the coming week, our talented team of engineers will work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to bring us to a historic event on April 11th. "
Beresheet was launched on February 21 from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, straddling a larger Indonesian satellite and an experimental spacecraft of the US Air Force.
The upper deck of the Falcon 9 released Beresheet on an elliptical orbit up to 69,000 kilometers in altitude. After the separation, the spacecraft deployed its four landing legs. With the landing gear extended, Beresheet has a diameter of about 2.3 meters and measures 1.5 meters tall, about the size of a golf cart.
A series of main engines burns Beresheet in a longer orbit that keeps the probe away from the Earth. Beresheet has traveled more than 3.4 million kilometers, or about 5.5 million kilometers, between his departure from Cape Canaveral and his arrival in lunar orbit.
The ground controllers identified a problem with the spacecraft's star tracking cameras shortly after its launch. The cameras make it possible to locate the position of the stars in the sky, thus helping to determine the orientation of Beresheet in the space. SpaceIL says that star followers are too sensitive to sunlight.
Beresheet also missed one of its engine burns in orbit at the end of February due to a computer reset, but the engineers kept the mission on schedule for its arrival on the moon.
With the landing of Beresheet – the most difficult task of the Space Shuttle – SpaceIL officials remain cautious about the mission's chances of reaching its target safely.
"Once we reach the right point, we will simply give the spacecraft the command to begin the landing phase," said Yariv Bash, co-founder of SpaceIL. "From that moment, the probe will automatically begin to land on the surface of the moon.
"About 5 meters above the surface of the moon, the speed will reach zero, then we will stop the engines and the spacecraft will make a free fall to the surface of the moon," said Bash on Tuesday. . "The spacecraft's legs were designed to withstand this fall, and we hope we can, once on the moon, send back images and videos to Earth."
Three young Israeli engineers and entrepreneurs founded SpaceIL in 2011 with the aim of obtaining the Google Lunar X Prize, which promised a grand prize of $ 20 million to the first team to land on a satellite with a private financing, to render high definition images and to demonstrate its mobility. the lunar surface.
The Google Lunar X Prize contest ended last year without a winner, but the Beresheet sponsors kept the mission alive.
Kahn, the largest financial contributor to the mission, serves as President of SpaceIL. Other donors include Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, a casino and resort mogul living in Las Vegas. LG's owner, IAI, has also invested some of its own internal research and development funds into the program.
The Israeli Space Agency has granted SpaceIL about $ 2 million, the only funding for the program.
The mission as a whole cost much less than any government supported lunar lander. Nevertheless, raising $ 100 million from private donors has proved a challenge.
"I had never dreamed that we were going to reach $ 100 million, but once we went, we went," Kahn said Tuesday. "It was a challenge and, in fact, I like challenges."
The X Prize Foundation, which organized the original Google Lunar X Prize contest, announced on March 28 that it would offer a $ 1 million "Moonshot Prize" to SpaceIL if the Beresheet mission landed on the moon.
"While the Google Lunar X Award has not been claimed, we are delighted to have encouraged teams from around the world to continue their ambitious lunar missions, and we are proud to recognize the success of SpaceIL with this Moonshot award, "said Anousheh. Ansari, managing director of the X Prize Foundation.
"SpaceIL's mission represents the democratization of space exploration," said Peter Diamandis, founder and executive chairman of the X Prize Foundation. "We are optimistic about the fall of this first domino, triggering a chain reaction of increasingly affordable and repeatable trade missions on the moon and beyond."
A successful landing will not only be a first for the private space industry, but will also push Israel into an exclusive group of nations that have installed a spacecraft on the moon. Until now, the United States, Russia and China have successfully put probes on the moon.
"We have the vision to show the best qualities of Israel to the whole world," said Sylvan Adams, a Canada-Israel businessman who helped finance the mission, at a meeting with press conference between the launch of Beresheet and his company. "Little Israel, little Israel, little Israel, is about to become the fourth nation to land on the moon. And it's a remarkable thing, because we continue to demonstrate our ability to weigh far, far beyond our weight, and to show our skills, our innovation, our creativity to solve any difficult problem that may possibly exist. "
Due to the project's limited budget – a fraction of the cost of the government-funded lunar landing gear – the Israeli team had to adapt the technology designed for other purposes to the Moon's mission. For example, the main thruster on the undercarriage is a modified engine, typically used to adjust the orbits of large communications satellites.
During the landing sequence, the engine will be turned on and off to control the rate of descent of the undercarriage. He can not be strangled.
Most spacecraft systems were built without backup to control costs.
"Our spacecraft has very low redundancy," Anteby said Tuesday. "A sensor that fails could fail the whole mission."
After landing, Beresheet will collect data on the magnetic field at the landing site. NASA has also provided a laser reflector on the probe, which scientists will use to determine the exact distance to the moon and to locate the undercarriage. The US Space Agency also provides communication and monitoring services to the mission.
The German space agency DLR has also helped the SpaceIL team to carry out drop tests to simulate the conditions encountered by the spacecraft at the time of landing.
The Israeli-made lander is designed to operate for at least two days on the moon, enough time to transmit basic science data, a series of panoramic images and a selfie. The laser reflector is a passive payload and will be useful long after stopping the spacecraft.
Beresheet also aims to deliver a time capsule on the moon with the Israeli flag and digital copies of the Israeli national anthem, the Bible and other national and cultural artefacts.
Opher Doron, general manager of the IAI's space division, said he had originally planned any corporate application for the design of the tailor-made LG after the Beresheet mission. But this is changing as NASA and the European Space Agency plan to buy commercial trips to the moon for scientific experiments and possibly people.
IAI and OHB, a German aerospace company, signed an agreement in January that could build on the Beresheet mission by building future commercial landers to carry scientific instruments and other payloads on the surface of the moon for the benefit of from ESA.
According to Doron, IAI is also in discussion with US companies to use Israeli technology developed for the Beresheet project on lunar commercial sites for NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Last year, NASA selected nine companies to compete for scientific and technological demonstration payload transportation contracts on the lunar surface.
SpaceIL and IAI were not among the winners, but Israeli engineers could partner with US companies to meet NASA's requirements.
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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