Israel’s privately funded Moon mission blasts off
CAPECANAVERAL,FLORIDA: A Spacex Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida on Thursday night carrying Israel’s first lunar lander on a mission that, if successful, will make the Jewish state only the fourth nation to achieve a controlled touchdown on the Moon’s surface.
The unmanned robotic lander dubbed Beresheet - Hebrew for the biblical phrase “in the beginning” - soared into space from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop the 23-story-tall rocket.
Beresheet, about the size of a dish-washing machine, was one of three sets of cargo carried aloft by the Falcon 9, part of the private rocket fleet of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Californiabased company Spacex.
The rocket’s two other payloads were a telecommunications satellite for Indonesia and an experimental satellite for the US Air Force.
Beresheet was jettisoned into Earth orbit about 34 minutes after launch.
JAPAN PROBE TOUCHES DOWN ON ASTEROID
After a four-year chase, a probe from Japan’s space agency called Hayabusa 2 pounced on its prey 300 million kilometres away.
On Friday, the space ship touched down on Ryugu, a 450million-ton carbonaceous rock in an orbit between Earth and Mars, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
It was a precision landing on a patch of even ground six metres across, about the size of a baseball pitcher’s mound on a surface studded with boulders. Touchdown lasted only a few seconds.