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The unmanned mission is a collaboration between Israel Aerospace Industries and the non-profit organization SpaceIL, which participated in the Google Lunar XPrize competition that ended in March with no final winner.
The first Israeli lunar spacecraft will be launched in December from Cape Canaveral, Florida The other three nations are the United States, Russia and China.
SpaceIL will send the module not yet named in the United States. States in November before the launch.
He added, "The launch of the first Israeli spacecraft will fill Israel, in its 70th year, with pride."
About this reports Reuters with a reference to the executive director SpaceIL IDO Anteby.
SpaceIL was formed by three people and participated in the Google Lunar XPRIZE contest, which ended in March without naming a winner.
The SpaceIL craft is 1.5 meters (five feet) high and two meters in diameter, capable of reaching a maximum speed of more than 10 kilometers (6 miles) per second . The LG will be a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will take off from Florida, the team said in a press release.
The research, conducted in cooperation with scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Rehovot, will use a magnetometer on the spacecraft to try to understand how the rocks on the moon received their magnetism. SpaceIL was the only Israeli competitor in the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) global contest, which offered a $ 20 million prize to the first private fund. team to put a robot on the moon, move it at least 1,650 feet and have high-definition beam photos and video on Earth.
First landing on the moon was carried out by the USSR in 1959. "We will all remember where we were when Israel landed on the moon," he said. This process will be executed autonomously by the ship's navigation control system. The entire journey, from launch to landing, will last about two months
Despite the initiative SpaceIL is well within the framework of the Google Lunar XC Prize on SpaceIL [19659012] will not get the prize as cash compensation as it was canceled by the initiator in March 2018 without winners.
After successfully raising critical funds to continue his activity, SpaceIL announced that he was determined to continue on his mission and launch his spacecraft by the end of of the year, regardless of the competition. To date, 50,000 children have been reached by volunteers SpaceIL in classrooms around the world
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