New Delhi: Israel’s Beresheet lunar lander, launched from Florida on February 21, won’t be reaching the moon as soon as planned. During an engine firing that was meant to get it closer to the Moon, the computer unexpectedly reset itself, and the manoeuvre was aborted.
Beresheet is scheduled to be the first non-government lunar landing. The 585-kg spacecraft was built by Israeli nonprofit space venture SpaceIL and state-owned defence contractor Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), with $100 million furnished almost entirely by private donors.
“During the pre-manoeuvre phase the spacecraft computer reset unexpectedly, causing the manoeuvre to be automatically cancelled,” SpaceIL said in a statement. “The engineering teams of SpaceIL and IAI are examining the data and analyzing the situation. At this time, the spacecraft’s systems are working well, except for the known problem in the star tracker.”
SpaceIL has said that so far Beresheet remains in communication with its control centre, and is ready to try another orbit-boosting burn, CNET reported.
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Star trackers, according to Spaceflight Now, are used by spacecraft to navigate with respect to target stars. Extreme Tech reported that Beresheet‘s star tracker problem was due to being blinded by the sun. The launch revealed “high sensitivity to blinding by the sun’s rays in the star trackers,” the website quoted another SpaceIL statement as saying.
Beresheet, about the size of a dish-washing machine, was one of three sets of cargo carried aloft by the Falcon 9 on February 21, part of the private rocket fleet of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It was scheduled to enter the lunar orbit on April 4 and spiral down to a lower altitude in preparation for landing on April 11, Spaceflight Now reported.
Israeli news agency Haaretz too reported that a technical snag had derailed the spacecraft’s schedule. This just a day after the agency published an article calling Beresheet a “giant leap for Israeli chutzpah”.
According to Haaretz, the Beresheet project ran into a number of difficulties before the launch. It was competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE challenge, which was aiming to take the first commercial lander to the moon. However, the prize was wrapped up without a winner being announced, Forbes reported. There was a time when it looked like the Beresheet project would fall through completely, but monetary interventions from private donations kept it going.
Given its financial troubles, Beresheet is taking a long and circuitous route to the moon, according to Spaceflight Now. This will help save money and fuel. According to a website, “The mission would have needed a dedicated rocket to make a direct trip to the moon, an expense the SpaceIL team could not afford.”
While it is not impossible and other spacecraft have taken the longer route to the moon before, Spaceflight Now says that this will mean “that the probe spends more time traveling through the radiation belts, donut-shaped rings of charged particles surrounding Earth that could pose a hazard to spacecraft electronics”.
(With Reuters inputs)