NASA's probe marks the last lunar resting place of the Israeli spacecraft that crashed / Boing Boing

Last month, SpaceIL's probe Beresheet, an Israeli non-profit organization, reached the lunar surface, but unfortunately it was not a soft landing. Beresheet was the first private lunar landing attempt and they got very close together. A few weeks after the accident, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter orbitered around the area and NASA released images showing the site of the impact. From NASA:

LROC took this image 90 km from the surface. 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.

From so far, LROC was unable to detect if Beresheet had formed a surface crater during impact. It is possible that the crater is too small to appear on the photos. Another possibility is that Beresheet formed a small recess instead of a crater, given its low angle of approach (about 8.4 degrees from the surface), its light weight (compared to a dense meteoroid of the same size) and its low speed (again, compared to a meteoroid of the same size, the Beresheet speed was always higher than that of most fastballs.

The slight halo around the mud could be from impact-associated gas or fine soil particles blown outward during the Beresheet descent, which would smooth the soil around the landing site, thus making it highly reflective. .

More importantly, we knew the coordinates of the landing site a few kilometers away thanks to the Beresheet radio tracking and we have 11 "before" images of the region, covering a decade, and three "after" images. On all these images, including the one taken 16 days before landing, we saw only one new feature the size that Beresheet would have created.

From NASA / GSFC / Arizona State University:

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.

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