ISRAEL BEGINS 2-MONTH JOURNEY TO THE MOON
CAPE CANAVERAL, DA— A SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida on Thursday carrying a lunar lander that, if successful, will make Israel only the fourth nation to ever land on the moon.
The unmanned robotic lander dubbed Beresheet (Hebrew for the biblical phrase “in the beginning”) took off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at about 8:45 p.m.
Part of commercial payload
Aside from the Beresheet, which is the size of a dishwashing machine, the rocket also carried a telecommunications satellite for Indonesia and an experimental satellite for the US Air Force.
Beresheet is slated to reach its destination on the near-side of the moon in mid-April following a two-month journey through 6.5 million kmof space.
A flight path directly from Earth to the moon would cover roughly 386,242 km, but Beresheet will follow a more circuitous route.
If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft’s gradually widening Earth orbit will eventually bring the probe within the moon’s gravitational pull, setting the stage for a series of additional maneuvers leading to an automated touchdown.
Beresheet was jettisoned into Earth orbit about 34 minutes after launch, followed 15 minutes later by the release of the two satellites, according to a SpaceX webcast of the event.
So far, only three other nations have carried out controlled “soft” landings on the moon—the United States, the former Soviet Union and China.
Spacecraft from several countries, including India’s Moon Impact Probe, Japan’s Selene orbiter and a European Space Agency orbital probe called Smart 1, have intentionally crashed on the lunar surface.
The US Apollo program tal- lied six manned missions to the moon—the only ones yet achieved—between 1969 and 1972.
China made history in January with its Chang’e 4, the first to touch down on the dark side of the moon.
First private landing
Beresheet would mark the first nongovernment lunar landing.
The 585-kg spacecraft was built by Israeli nonprofit space venture SpaceIL and state-owned defense contractor Israel Aerospace Industries with $100 million furnished almost entirely by private donors.
Beresheet is designed to spend two to three days using on-board instruments to photograph its landing site and measure the moon’s magnetic field.
At the end of its brief mission, mission controllers would shut down the spacecraft, according to SpaceIL officials, leaving Beresheet as the latest piece of human litter on the moon.