Beresheet on display before its launch, December 17, 2018. (Ariel Schalit/AP)
The Israeli team aiming to land a spacecraft on the moon in two weeks can now expect more than glory if it works. How about a cool $1 million?
The XPrize Foundation announced Thursday it’s offering the hefty prize for a successful lunar landing.
Israel’s privately financed spacecraft Beresheet — Hebrew for “Genesis” — launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida last month. It’s on track to land on the moon April 11, which would make Israel only the fourth country to successfully pull off a lunar landing.
SpaceIL, the Israeli nonprofit behind Beresheet, made the final cut in the $20 million Google Lunar XPrize competition, which ended last year without a winner. The new award was inspired by SpaceIL’s perseverance.
On Sunday, engineers with SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries released a number of photos from Beresheet’s camera, including a selfie with the Earth from 265,000 kilometers (165,000 miles) above the planet’s surface and a video of the sunrise in space.
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Photo taken by the Beresheet spacecraft in which an Israeli flag can be seen on a plaque with the inscription, ‘Am Yisrael Chai,’ or ‘The Jewish People Lives,’ and in English, ‘Small country, big dreams,’ taken 37,600 kilometers from Earth. (Courtesy SpaceIL/IAI)
The four-legged Beresheet, about the size of a small car, is circling Earth in increasingly larger elliptical loops until it maneuvers into the moon’s orbit.
It is currently on the last loop around the Earth, which will take until April 4. Aside from a few small glitches with an unexpected system reset and some problems with the star-tracking navigation system, the spacecraft is on schedule to make the landing.
A plaque installed on the outside of the lunar lander depicts Israel’s national flag, as well as the phrases “Am Yisrael Chai” (the people of Israel live) and “Small country, big dreams.”
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If successful, Beresheet will make history twice: as the first private-sector landing on the moon, and the first craft from Israel to reach the orb.
If Beresheet successfully lands, the spacecraft is expected to carry out two or three days of experiments collecting data about the moon’s magnetic fields before shutting down.
The distance between Earth and the moon is approximately 384,000 kilometers (240,000 miles). Beresheet’s elliptical route, which saves on fuel needs by harnessing the gravitational pull of the Earth, will cover about 6.5 million kilometers (4 million miles). The spacecraft is traveling at a speed of about 10 km/sec (36,000 km/h) on its way to the moon, or 13 times faster than the maximum speed of an F-15 fighter jet.
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