Was Israel’s First Lunar Landing Mission A Total Failure?

Slated to perform a series of scientific experiments on the Sea of Serenity, was Israel’s first ever lunar mission a total failure?

By: Ringo Bones

The dishwasher-sized robotic spacecraft was called Beresheet – a Biblical reference that means “in the beginning” – attempted Israel’s first ever privately-funded lunar landing on the night (7:23 PM Israel local time) of Thursday, April 11, 2019, but a failure of its main engine put an end to that. The 600-kilogram four-legged space probe was designed and built by an Israeli nonprofit firm called SpaceIL and with a total cost of about 95-million US dollars, including launch, Beresheet was a bargain-basement spacecraft. Had the mission been successful, it would have made Israel the fourth nation ever (together with the United States, Russia / the then USSR, and The People’s Republic of China) to have an unmanned spacecraft survive a lunar-landing attempt. Nonetheless, Israel’s Beresheet lunar lander managed to transmit one final “photo”, a kind of the unmanned spacecraft’s own selfie, about 23-kilometers above the lunar surface before its main engine failure.

The planned landing site for the Beresheet spacecraft was Mare Serenitatis, or the “Sea of Serenity” in the northern hemisphere of the Moon – a dark lava-covered site of ancient volcanic eruptions and a long-source of magnetic and gravitational anomalies of every unmanned lunar orbital spacecraft that flew above the site. As seen from planet Earth’s surface, the Sea of Serenity is the famed “left eye” of the Man in the Moon.

Beresheet was designed to take measurements of the Moon’s magnetic field using an instrument supplied by the University of California, Los Angeles. If the craft had landed safely, SpaceIL would have shared the spacecraft’s data with NASA and other space agencies and “hop” Beresheet to another location using its thrusters. Bersheet not only spent seven weeks in space but also closed the 3.7-million kilometer gap between planet Earth and the Moon and then entered into lunar orbit – making Israel the seventh country ever to do so – and successfully completed a series of engine burns to poise it for a landing attempt. Due to its low cost, the mission was far from a total failure because the underwriters of the first ever Israel lunar landing mission still has a budget for a second attempt.