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"In the beginning"...
After last night's launch atop Falcon 9 B5 1048.3
Emre Kelly ✔ @EmreKelly (Florida Today)
"SpaceIL has confirmed acquisition of signal and landing leg deploy. They are on their way to the moon," #SpaceX launch staff says. Congrats to all involved.@TeamSpaceIL
9:31 PM - Feb 21, 2019
https://twitter.com/EmreKelly/status...72289007640578
https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astr...t-lander-moon/
After last night's launch atop Falcon 9 B5 1048.3
Emre Kelly ✔ @EmreKelly (Florida Today)
"SpaceIL has confirmed acquisition of signal and landing leg deploy. They are on their way to the moon," #SpaceX launch staff says. Congrats to all involved.@TeamSpaceIL
9:31 PM - Feb 21, 2019
https://twitter.com/EmreKelly/status...72289007640578
https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astr...t-lander-moon/
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lit up the night skies over Florida's Space Coast on the evening of Thursday, February 21st. It carried a group of payloads into space, including the first privately funded lunar lander: the Beresheet mission from Israeli company SpaceIL. Liftoff occurred at just after 8:45 p.m. EST (1:45 UT). The Falcon 9 stage one booster that launched the missions also successfully landed on the offshore OCISLY (Of Course I Still Love You) drone ship about eight minutes after liftoff.
Originally nicknamed Sparrow, Beresheet (Hebrew for the phrase from the Book of Genesis, in the beginning) weighs in at 1283 pounds (582 kilograms), including about 882 pounds (400 kilograms) of propellant. The lander is 5 feet (1.5 meters) high by 6 feet (2 meters) wide. It shares the rocket's nose fairing with Indonesia's Nusantara Satu communications satellite and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory's S5 space situational awareness satellite. Both of the satellites are headed towards geostationary orbit.
A Long Journey Ahead
The lander's trip to the launch pad was a long one, and it still has a ways to go geostationary orbit will only get the lander a tenth of the way to the Moon. Its journey will take about seven weeks, as the lander slowly raises its orbit for capture by the Moon in early May 2019.
If successful, Israel will become the fourth nation behind the United States, Russia, and China to make a soft landing on the Moon. India and Japan have also fielded orbiters around the Moon. Tracking stations worldwide will now monitor Beresheet, as SpaceIL controls the mission from company headquarters in Tel Aviv. The mission team will be scouting out the 9.3-mile (15-kilometer) landing ellipse in the Mare Serenitatis (Sea of Serenity) in preparation for landing.
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Originally nicknamed Sparrow, Beresheet (Hebrew for the phrase from the Book of Genesis, in the beginning) weighs in at 1283 pounds (582 kilograms), including about 882 pounds (400 kilograms) of propellant. The lander is 5 feet (1.5 meters) high by 6 feet (2 meters) wide. It shares the rocket's nose fairing with Indonesia's Nusantara Satu communications satellite and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory's S5 space situational awareness satellite. Both of the satellites are headed towards geostationary orbit.
A Long Journey Ahead
The lander's trip to the launch pad was a long one, and it still has a ways to go geostationary orbit will only get the lander a tenth of the way to the Moon. Its journey will take about seven weeks, as the lander slowly raises its orbit for capture by the Moon in early May 2019.
If successful, Israel will become the fourth nation behind the United States, Russia, and China to make a soft landing on the Moon. India and Japan have also fielded orbiters around the Moon. Tracking stations worldwide will now monitor Beresheet, as SpaceIL controls the mission from company headquarters in Tel Aviv. The mission team will be scouting out the 9.3-mile (15-kilometer) landing ellipse in the Mare Serenitatis (Sea of Serenity) in preparation for landing.
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