Israel’s attempt to be the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon ended in failure Thursday when the Beresheet lunar lander crashed during its descent.
Both the nonprofit organization SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries’ space division confirmed the landing was a failure after a live broadcast of the attempted landing went dark in the final minutes.
“Don’t stop believing! We came close but unfortunately didn’t succeed with the landing process,” the tweeted the team at Israel-based SpaceIL, which was trying to become the first-ever private company to land a spacecraft on another world.
Don’t stop believing! We came close but unfortunately didn’t succeed with the landing process. More updates to follow.#SpaceIL #Beresheet pic.twitter.com/QnLAwEdKRv
— Israel To The Moon (@TeamSpaceIL) April 11, 2019
The photo included in the tweet was the same one the team shared only minutes earlier, before contact was lost, showing the craft approximately 22 kilometers from the moon’s surface with a metal plate of the Israel flag and the words “small country, big dreams” underneath it.
Only the United States, China, and Russia have successfully landed a ship on Earth’s lone natural satellite.
Beresheet, named after the first word in the Torah in Hebrew to mean “Beginning,” was supposed to spend approximately three days studying the moon’s magnetic field before the craft would be crippled by the intensity of the sun’s rays. However, during descent, Beresheet’s main engine failed, dropping the ship to the moon’s surface.
The unmanned, roughly car-sized spaceship, did however make Israel the seventh country to accomplish the tricky space maneuver of hopping from Earth’s orbit to the orbit around the moon.
Beresheet’s landing had to be blind, leaving open the possibility of boulders or rocks tipping the craft over. Engineers were not able to adjust the ship’s course as the 25-minute landing procedure was completely automated.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in attendance and led a celebration of the group’s efforts and congratulated them on making it as far as they did. “If at first you don’t succeed, try again,” Netanyahu said after the crash before predicting a successful landing of an Israeli spacecraft in the next two or three years.
The Beresheet project started as part of a nongovernmental entry into Google’s LunarX competition, which closed in 2018 with no winners. The Israeli team decided to continue their efforts independently.
Daniel Chaitin contributed to this report.
