Israeli Moon Lander Touchdown scheduled for Thursday, 11 Apr 2019

Israeli Moon Lander Poised for Lunar Touchdown Thursday

https://www.space.com/israel-moon-lander-lunar-touchdown-final-approach.html

Israel's robotic Beresheet moon lander is nearing its moment of truth: an epic lunar-touchdown attempt scheduled to occur between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. EDT (1900 and 2000 GMT) on Thursday (April 11).

The lander will touch down within Mare Serenitatis, on the northern hemisphere of the moon's near side. The target region is located in the northeastern part of Mare Serenitatis, west of the main Posidonius Crater. This area harbors three possible landing sites: a primary site and two backups.

In addition to a suite of cameras, the mission has integrated a scientific payload consisting of a small Lunar Retroreflector Array (LRA) provided by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said team member Oded Aharonson, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Beresheet also has a magnetometer, provided by the University of California, Los Angeles, which will explore the region's magnetic anomalies.

The laser altimeter on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will try to shoot laser pulses at Beresheet’s retroreflector and then measure how long it takes the light to bounce back. By using this technique, engineers expect to be able to pinpoint Beresheet’s location within 4 inches (10 centimeters).


The small retroreflector:

Will there be a live feed?

Marc_G said:

Will there be a live feed?

Click to expand...

It sounds like there will be live coverage tomorrow afternoon.

https://www.visit.spaceil.com/

Now, what of they find evidence of the 1969 landing? How will the conspiracy theories hold up to that? Israel must be in collusion with the USA, I guess.

Bat-mite said:

Now, what of they find evidence of the 1969 landing? How will the conspiracy theories hold up to that? Israel must be in collusion with the USA, I guess.

Click to expand...

All space faring or telescope deploying governments are in on the scam.

The link in Post #3 says live coverage in about 3 hours from about now, so about noon time MST. (Winston has info about the landing site in Post #1).

P.S. There is some more background info here about today's landing attempt:

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/04/...li-probe-set-for-daring-moon-landing-attempt/

Here is a another live-link. It looks similar to the link in Post #3. Live coverage looks like in about 45 minutes.

"We had a failure of the spacecraft. We unfortunately have not been able to land successfully," says Opher Doron of Israel Aerospace Industries.

Crashed. Shortly before landing they had an INS issue, lost telemetry, got it back to find the the main engine had stopped firing. They got it firing again, but only for few seconds. I saw the descent rate indicator increasing into the red and thought, uh-oh! Last telemetry frame indicated 143.3 m/s velocity at 149 m altitude.

It was fun watching the lunar landing. For awhile things looked like they were going very well, but then there were main engine problems and telemetry problems. It looks like the landing was hard and the spacecraft did not survive. It took courage to broadcast the landing live to the whole world. Nothing can be taken for granted in doing space missions.

aerostadt said:

It looks like the landing was hard and the spacecraft did not survive.

Click to expand...

See my post above. Impact at >143.3 m/s.

I thought they said they lost telemetry due to an IMU issue followed by a reboot, lost the main, then the velocity went from green 22m/s to yellow, then to red and the rest was as said above. @ 143.3m/s impact there is likely very little left but more moon junk.

I agree it took guts to go as live as they did and show the information on the screen like they did, but it was refreshing to watch. Hopefully they regroup and try again as they accomplished quite a bit on this one and it would be a shame to walk away at this stage.

"Yehud, we have a problem."

I wonder if the commercial grade electronics they used weren't up to the task.

"I thought they said they lost telemetry due to an IMU issue followed by a reboot, lost the main, then the velocity went from green 22m/s to yellow, then to red and the rest was as said above."

That's basically what I said, saying INS (Inertial Navigation System) instead which is roughly a synonym for IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit). They got telemetry back, saw that the main engine was off, sent a command to restart it which succeeded, but then it seemed to turn off again according to the activity indicator boxes for the main engine and control thrusters, then the descent rate turned red and its value increased steadily. At that point I knew the situation was very bad.

I'll post a link to a screen shot of the last telemetry screen. I transposed some numbers - it was 134.3 not 143.3 m/s. Horizontal velocity was 946.7 m/s! Maybe the surface scar it left will be an interesting target for a LRO image.

Too bad.

Even once they got the engine started again, had it remained firing and under control, it was almost certainly too late, having fallen so far and increased velocity so much. There's not much room for error on powered retrothrust landings.

The USSR failed something like 17 out of 24 times during their Luna programme. I hope Israel regroups and tries again.

That was great to watch! I hope they try again.

I t was great to see the telemetry data they posted - I have never seen that much info before! Great info to track the descent in real time!

LRO pics should be awesome!

SpaceIL is talking about a new lunar lander.

https://www.space.com/israel-moon-lander-beresheet-2.html

There is talk about private donors coming forward.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...shot-after-maiden-mission-fails-idUSKCN1RP0LU

Some kind of technical glitch, perhaps a faulty, caused the failure.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47914100

This absolutely has the potential to be a stupid question, but whilst reading two articles prior to the landing, in one they said that Beresheet would be using laser rangefinding on the final approach to the surface. In the other, they said that the US built LRO would be "watching" the decent using *it's* lasers to provide detailed position and altitude data on the descent. Is there any way that the LRO's lasers interfered with Beresheet's lasers?

Beresheet's impact site shown in NASA photo's.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/scienc...te-israel-s-beresheet-moon-lander-ncna1006151

Oooph, well there'll be a patch of rare earth metal dust on the moon for future civilizations to puzzle over