Broadcasting the moon landing [22: 00MSK 11 Apr 2019]

Photo nytimes.com



The upcoming Thursday evening before Cosmonautics Day turned out to be extremely successful! Lovers of interplanetary travel waiting for not only the first commercial launch of Falcon Heavy , but also a real landing on the moon !



The hero of this post is the Israeli non-profit organization SpaceIL , created in 2011, to participate in the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) competition, offering a prize for landing a private automatic interplanetary station on the moon. Despite the fact that the GLXP competition ended without revealing a winner, SpaceIL managed to complete the construction of the Beresheet lunar probe and send it to the Moon.

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On February 21, 2019, the device was launched on a Falcon 9 booster and launched into orbit with an apogee of 60 thousand km. C using its own propulsion system, Beresheet raised the apogee of the orbit so as to be captured by the gravitational pull of the moon. It took almost 8 weeks. Before landing, he will make two orbits around the moon. And tonight in Moscow we will be able to watch the landing of the Beresheet on the moon live!







UPD 22:25 MSK An abnormal engine shutdown, then loss of communication with the device during the final maneuvering during the approach. Most likely, the device is lost.



The planned landing site for the probe is the Sea of ​​Clarity in the northern hemisphere, where one of the lunar magnetic anomalies is located, not far from the landing site of the Luna-21 probe and the Apollo-17 ship. Since Bereshit does not have thermal protection and cooling systems, he can work on the surface of the moon for about two days, until the electronics and batteries fail due to overheating. If successful, the probe will be the smallest and lightest device in history, landing on a natural satellite of the Earth.





Image wired.co.uk



SpaceIL's uniqueness among applicants for victory in the GLXP was that, instead of building a tracked or wheeled all-terrain vehicle, SpaceIL planned to meet the requirement to overcome 500 meters on the lunar surface by jumping from a landing site to another point 500 meters using rocket engines.

His farewell bow