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The first Israeli spacecraft scheduled to land on the Moon will be launched in December, the SpaceIL initiative behind the craft announced Tuesday. The plan is for the spacecraft to land on the moon on February 13, 2019, after a two-month trip.
The SpaceIL organization participates in the Google Lunar XC Prize contest to win the first privately funded unmanned spacecraft on the Moon. Even though the contest has officially ended without a winner at the end of March this year, after a number of extensions to the $ 30 million cash award deadline, the competition continues without any further consideration. # 39; money.
But SpaceIL continued to develop its spaceship, which it began to build in 2013 in cooperation with Israel Aeronautics Industries. The spacecraft will be launched from Cape Canaveral Florida aboard a Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX company Elon Musk. The spacecraft will separate from its two-stage launching rocket at an altitude of 60,000 kilometers above the ground, where it will enter an elliptical orbit around the earth, which will slowly expand to the ground that the machine is captured by lunar gravity.
Ido Anteby, the CEO of the non-profit organization SpaceIL, says it will be the smallest spacecraft ever to land on the moon. It is about two meters in diameter and one and a half meters high. It will weigh 585 kilograms at launch, but will land with a weight of only 180 kilograms after burning most of its fuel.
SpaceIL hopes to make Israel the fourth country in the world – after the United States, Russia and China, to land a spacecraft on the moon. Beyond technological achievements and public relations, the initiative aims to arouse Israelis' interest in space and science, especially the younger generation, and to encourage them to study the trades. of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The non-profit association SpaceIL was founded in 2010 by three young engineers – Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub – to participate in the Google sponsored contest, which originally included a prize $ 20 million for the first group. spaceship on the moon. SpaceIL has grown over the years and has 50 employees. Most of his employees are engineers, while 10 others are involved in education.
The SpaceIL spacecraft also has a scientific mission: to decipher the magnetic mysteries of lunar rocks. The research, conducted in cooperation with scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, will use a magnetometer on the spacecraft to try to understand how the rocks on the moon received their magnetism.
One of the aims of the project is to create an "Apollo effect" in Israel, referring to the enthusiasm that began in the United States and around the world, encouraging scientific research after the Apollo Moon's first landing in 1969, said billionaire Morris Kahn, who provided the bulk of the funding for SpaceIL on Tuesday morning at the press conference.
SpaceIL spent about 320 million shekels ($ 88.5 million) on this project, of which about 100 million shekels came from Kahn and most of the rest from private donors.
When Google launched the competition in 2010, one of the conditions was that the spacecraft took off by 2014. But Google realized that the delays that it had set were too ambitious, the launch date was deferred several times. The final deadline was the end of March 2018.
Participants must be non-governmental entities (such as private companies) that build and launch the craft in space, bring it successfully to the moon, move it over 500 meters along the lunar surface and transmit it to the Earth. . Israel is fighting four other groups, the United States, Japan, India and an international group including Brazil, Croatia, the United States, India, Malaysia, the United Kingdom and Australia.
Among SpaceIL's donors, apart from Kahn, are a foundation of the Adelson family, businessman Sami Sagol, the Israeli Space Agency (which is part of the Ministry of Defense). Science) and the Weizmann Institute.
Although it is a non-profit organization initiated by the private sector, the SpaceIL project could be considered a national enterprise. He has 50 employees – as well as 200 volunteers speaking about the project in schools across Israel.
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