Photo: SpaceIL
Earlier this April, Israel was on track to become part of a select and until now closed group of countries that have landed a machine on the Moon. The crash of SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander also crushed the nation’s hopes, at least for now.
It’s still not clear what went wrong with the spacecraft. Beresheet spent more than two weeks approaching the Moon, and everything worked as intended up to the most important moment.
On April 11, the spacecraft suffered a cascade of failures, with telemetry going down first, then recovering only to give way to an engine shut off. Mission control managed to bring the engine back online, but after a second communication’s failure, all was lost.
Having had time to look into the matter, SpaceIL’s preliminary conclusions are that a manual command might have triggered the cascading failures. The company did not specify the nature of the command, nor who was responsible for it.
Whatever it was, it “led to a chain reaction in the spacecraft, during which the main engine switched off, which prevented it from activating further," SpaceIL said in a statement cited by Space.
Since the lander went down, NASA decided to send the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) above the crash site to have a look at the wreck. The American space agency hopes that one of the experiments that hitched a ride to the Moon on the lander might have survived.
The experiment in question is called Lunar Retroreflector Array (LRA), a ball made of eight quartz mirrors that was supposed to act as a landing beacon of sorts for future missions to the Moon.
The full results of the investigation into the crash of the Beresheet will be announced later this year.
SpaceIL was a competitor in Google’s Lunar X-Prize, a competition set up to encourage the development of low-cost methods of robotic space exploration.
On April 11, the spacecraft suffered a cascade of failures, with telemetry going down first, then recovering only to give way to an engine shut off. Mission control managed to bring the engine back online, but after a second communication’s failure, all was lost.
Having had time to look into the matter, SpaceIL’s preliminary conclusions are that a manual command might have triggered the cascading failures. The company did not specify the nature of the command, nor who was responsible for it.
Whatever it was, it “led to a chain reaction in the spacecraft, during which the main engine switched off, which prevented it from activating further," SpaceIL said in a statement cited by Space.
Since the lander went down, NASA decided to send the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) above the crash site to have a look at the wreck. The American space agency hopes that one of the experiments that hitched a ride to the Moon on the lander might have survived.
The experiment in question is called Lunar Retroreflector Array (LRA), a ball made of eight quartz mirrors that was supposed to act as a landing beacon of sorts for future missions to the Moon.
The full results of the investigation into the crash of the Beresheet will be announced later this year.
SpaceIL was a competitor in Google’s Lunar X-Prize, a competition set up to encourage the development of low-cost methods of robotic space exploration.
Google News