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WASHINGTON – NASA on Wednesday released images of the impact site where the Israeli probe Beresheet crashed into the moon, claiming that it appeared as "a dark spot, about 10 meters wide" on the lunar surface.
On April 11, the tiny Israeli spacecraft crashed during a landing attempt, but the project officials promised to solve the technical problems behind the accident and attempt a second time to become the fourth country to land. no problem a probe on the moon.
NASA said the photos had been taken by its lunar reconnaissance speaker when it passed over a height of 90 km above the surface.
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"The cameras captured a dark spot, about 10 meters wide, which indicates the point of impact. The dark tone suggests a roughened surface by a hard landing, which is less reflective than a clean, smooth surface, "NASA said.
Left: Beresheet impact site. Right: a processed image to highlight changes near the landing site among photos taken before and after landing, revealing a white impact halo. Other craters are visible in the right image as there is a slight change in lighting conditions between the before and after pictures. The bar of scale is at 100 meters. North is in place. Both panels are 490 meters wide.
(NASA / GSFC / Arizona State University)
NASA said it was unclear whether the probe would have caused a crater in the lunar surface, claiming that its angle of attack was perhaps too superficial. However, he noted that "Beresheet's speed was always faster than most fastballs".
The slight halo around the impact site could be due to "gas associated with the impact or the presence of fine soil particles blown outward during the Beresheet descent".
The US Space Agency said it was almost certain that the impact site was created by humans and not by one of the many meteors that regularly bombard the moon's surface, highlighting the many images of this site and that it conforms to the mathematical models of the planet. what was the place of the accident and the coordinates expected in an area called the sea of serenity to look like
What does not appear clearly in the images is the fate of the digital library on board the ship.
The library contains 30 million pages of archives on human history and civilization, covering all subjects, cultures, nations, languages and genres. It is housed in a stack of 100 nickel disks, each 40 microns thick, weighing 100 grams (0.2 pounds), which have been etched using nanotechnology.
Photo taken December 17, 2018 with a digital capsule containing Israeli children's drawings, images of Israeli symbols such as the flag, Israeli songs and a booklet written by a Jewish man about his experience of the Holocaust. to be placed in the Beresheet spacecraft, is presented at a presentation of Israeli SpaceIL nonprofit and the Israeli Israeli Aerospace Industries company in Yehud, east of Tel Aviv. (Jack Guez / AFP)
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield said that he would like to search for it, calling the records "a frisbee of 30 million pages on the moon – I hope to recover it someday".
Beresheet was a joint venture between SpaceIL and Israeli Aerospace Industries, funded almost entirely by private donations from leading Jewish philanthropists, including Kahn, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, Lynn Schusterman, and others.
The cost of 100 million (370 million NIS) of the first lander represented a fraction of the cost of previous, state-funded efforts to land on the moon.
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