NASA has released photos from the site of the Beresheet (Genesis) impact on the moon. A NASA camera photographed the impact area before it reached the moon and after, one of the founders of SpaceIl: “No doubt, we left a mark”
The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet indeed reached the moon, and thus Israel became the seventh country in the world to succeed in bringing a spacecraft to the moon but failed to complete the landing.
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Since more than a month has passed, the president of SpaceIL, billionaire Maurice Kahn, has promised Israel citizens to build “Genesis 2” and return to the moon.
But today, NASA – the US space agency – has released images of “before” and “after” Beresheet hit zone. The area of impact appears before April 11, when the first Israeli spacecraft arrived at the moon. After a smooth initial descent, Beresheet made a hard landing on the surface on April 22, in which the area of impact was seen.
LROC took this image from 56 miles (90 kilometers) above the surface. The cameras captured a dark smudge, about 10 meters wide, that indicates the point of impact. The dark tone suggests a surface roughened by the hard landing.
According to the explanations on the LROC project site, the damage caused by Beresheet did not create a crater in the moon. Maybe the crater is too small to be seen in the photograph. The reason for this is the low angle of the impact, the fragility of the probe and the speed at which it reached the ground.
The images were taken by the LROC system – three cameras mounted on a spacecraft orbiting the moon and taking high-resolution images of the moon’s surface.
As we recall, the miraculous journey of “Genesis” toward the moon ended in disappointment, when it failed to complete the landing. Subsequent tests revealed that a failure in the acceleration component led to a chain of reactions during which the engine was switched off. Dr. Ido Antebi, the director general of the SpaceIL association, said at the time that “the spacecraft functioned as expected, in a completely autonomous manner, until the start of the event, with the receipt of a failure message of a component that measures accelerations. “In fact”, Said Antebi,” There was no such event from the beginning of the mission, and after that happened, an operating order was sent to it, which caused a chain of events in which the main engine stopped and was unable to return it to continuous operation.”
He stressed: “When the engine does not work, the spacecraft can not make a soft landing and that is the fate of the mission.” SpaceIL CEO explained that “if the event did not happen, a good picture of the spacecraft would have appeared and it might have returned to normal functioning.”
According to him, the command did not directly cause the shutdown of the main engine, but to the computer’s reset and from there it rolled away. “We still have to go in and understand the technical details in depth, but that’s what we saw in telemetry,” he explained. “We still do not have an estimate of what caused the fault.” He stressed that the team has not yet performed an analysis of the decision making in the control room, but only of the sequence of events and of what the spacecraft actually saw.
