SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Israeli company SpaceIL's lunar Lander blasted off from Florida. If successful Israel will join the club of country which include Russia, the US and China who have made successful control landing on the surface of earth's nearest neighbour.
Israel's mission to moon
- Funded almost entirely by donations, the project is the first privately backed the lunar Lander mission . the project costed $100 Million
- Named the spacecraft weight 585 kg
- Beresheet will make a seven week journey to the Moon, from where it will send back images of the Rocky surface and conduct experiment on the lunar magnetic field
- the spacecraft is named Beresheet as a reference to the first words of the Bible in the Hebrew: "In the beginning"
Landings the moon
- The first landing on the Moon was made by Soviet Union with Luna 2 in 1959
- three years later the United State landed Ranger 4 on the Moon
- Both Luna 2 and Ranger 4 were hard landing where the craft crashed into the moon
- the first "soft landing" wherein the space crafts made controlled decents to the lunar surface for both us and India came in 1966
- The third country to do soft landing on the Moon was China in the year 2013 with its Chang'e 3
SpaceIL
SpaceIL is a non profit company founded eight year ago to compete in the Google lunar X prize an international competition to see whether a private enterprise Woodland a spacecraft on the moon and move 500 m in any direction and transmit live high definition video from the lunar surface
But the competition got cancelled in the year 2018 when none of the five teams left in the competition was able to meet March deadline for a launch.
