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Engineers confirmed early Friday morning that the Beresheet probe was successfully captured by lunar gravity during a tricky maneuver the previous night, making Israel the seventh country in the world to have successfully sent objects in orbit around the moon.
The United States, Russia (as the USSR), Japan, China, the European Space Agency and India have all visited the moon through probes, although only the states Russia and China have successfully landed on the Moon. other probes lost control and crashed to the surface.
If Israel manages to land as planned on April 11, it will also be the first time a privately financed company lands there.
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Early Friday morning, Beresheet returned photos, including one shot at a distance of only 470 kilometers above the surface of the moon.
The 370 million NIS space probe ($ 100 million) is a joint venture between SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit organization, and Israel Aerospace Industries, funded almost entirely by private donations from well-known Jewish philanthropists.
On Thursday, Beresheet's engineers performed the most complicated maneuver to date: a perfectly choreographed space jump, allowing the car-sized spacecraft to move from an orbit around the Earth to another around the moon.
In order for the spacecraft to successfully enter orbit around the moon, Beresheet had to slow down from 8,500 km / s (5,280 km / s) to 7,500 km / s (4,660 km / s). Although it still seems fast for mere humans, according to the engineers, it's the orbital equivalent of brake snapping. The engineers did this by rotating the spacecraft so that its engines pushed it in the opposite direction, slowing down the speed.
It took about nine minutes for eight different engines to slowly maneuver the spacecraft in the right direction and just under six minutes for the engines to slow it down to the correct speed.
Engineers celebrate in the Beresheet control room in Yehud on April 4, 2019 after announcing that the gravitational pull of the moon had most likely managed to capture the Beresheet probe, the most complicated maneuver it has performed since its launch. (Eliran Avital / courtesy Beresheet)
Thursday was the longest period during which engineers have powered the engines since the launch of the satellite on February 22.
Beresheet will now trace increasingly smaller loops around the moon before landing on April 11 in the sea of serenity.
An image taken by the Beresheet probe of the moon's surface with the Earth in the background on April 5, 2019. (courtesy Beresheet)
"There is a good chance we will have an emergency landing," said Opher Doron, general manager of the space division at Israel Aerospace Industries. "It's very dangerous and it's hard to predict if we will succeed."
In total, the spacecraft has traveled about 5.5 million kilometers and there are about a million left. This is the slowest and longest journey a spacecraft has made on the Moon. The distance from Earth to the Moon averages about 385,000 km (239,000 miles).
Beresheet, which means "Genesis" in Hebrew, was launched on 22 February in Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop a Falcon 9 rocket from the private SpaceX company of entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Beresheet exposed before its launch on December 17, 2018. (Ariel Schalit / AP)
The project was launched as an Israeli entry into the Google LunarX Challenge to allow non-governmental groups to land on a satellite. Google ended the contest in 2018 without a winner, but the Israeli team decided to continue its efforts privately.
If Beresheet successfully lands on April 11th, the spacecraft should do two or three days of experiments to collect data on the magnetic fields of the moon before extinguishing. There, it will remain, perhaps forever, on the surface of the moon, joining about 181,000 kilograms (400,000 pounds by the weight of the Earth) of artificial debris scattered on the surface of the moon.
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