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The first Israeli spacecraft to travel to the moon pbaded Thursday, April 4, the most crucial test to date: entering lunar orbit a week before descending to the surface of our natural satellite.
After traveling 5.5 million kilometers around the Earth and gradually approaching the Moon, the small ship entered the elliptical orbit of the Moon. The landing on the moon is scheduled for April 11th.
"It's a milestone that really gives us the opportunity to reach the moon," said Yonatan Winetraub, co-founder of SpaceIL, the Israeli non-profit company that made the spacecraft.
The space probe – called Beresheet, which means in Hebrew Genesis or Early – is the smallest in history that enters lunar orbit.
From the Yehud Control Center near Tel Aviv, the engineers checked the speed of the ship. To get away from the Earth and "catch" the gravitational pull of the Moon, Beresheet had to reduce its speed from 8,500 to 7,500 kilometers per hour.
Behind a window, the spectators held their breath when the screens showed that the Beresheet engines were running. At the end of five minutes, the module reached the perfect speed and the engineers began to clap, hug and shake hands.
A failure of the slowdown could have ended the mission.
"The price of an error would have been infinite," said Opher Doron, director of Israel Aerospace Industries' space division, who collaborated on the project with SpaceIL. "We would have turned in space to an orbit of the Sun in which nobody would want to enter."
Inside the lunar orbit, Beresheet draws smaller and smaller circles around the moon, then tries to land.
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