2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Israeli private company SpaceIL has abandoned a second attempt to land on the moon. Such a flight was deemed of little interest, so the company will look for another target for its Bereshit-2 spacecraft, SpaceIL reported on Twitter.
The lunar probe "Bereshit" was created within the framework of the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition by the Israeli non-profit organization SpaceIL, which, after the competition was closed, managed to raise the necessary funds to complete the work and pay for the launch. It was the smallest lunar lander in history, carrying six 8-megapixel color cameras, a magnetometer, a digital time capsule and laser corner reflectors, and became the first private spacecraft to orbit the moon and enter lunar orbit.
The mission started in February 2019, and in early April, the device was preparing to land in the northeastern part of the Sea of Clarity, but crashed due to a malfunction of the inertial sensor, which led to the main engine stopping. As a result, the device crashed into the lunar surface at high speed, and its debris scattered 50 meters.
After the crash of the spacecraft, the XPRIZE foundation still gave SpaceIL a Moonshot Award in the amount of one million dollars, and a few days later it was announced that the creation of a new lunar lander "Bereshit-2", the design of which would be similar to the first spacecraft, was announced. However, on June 25, the company announced that members of the Board of Directors of SpaceIL, after lengthy discussions, decided to abandon the second flight to the Moon, since this project was considered insufficiently breakthrough and does not pose serious enough tasks for the development and engineering team. SpaceIL has decided to involve the general public in the selection of the target for the new device, the company promises to publish additional information later.
Earlier we talked about how India recently damaged the landing platform of its first lunar rover Prahayan during tests, which led to the postponement of the start of the Chandrayan-2 lunar mission indefinitely.
