I'm setting this up in preparation for the launch of SpaceIL's lunar mission, probably early next year. They have arranged a rideshare with Spaceflight Industries on a Falcon 9 launch early in 2019. Earlier they were saying launch in December, land on the Moon in February, so now I assume the landing might be delayed until March. This mission was originally going to be part of the Google Lunar X Prize, but that of course is now gone. It might be rekindled with a different sponsor (though I doubt it).

SpaceIL is the first of the GLXP teams to actually make it to a launch. For what it's worth, I expect Astrobotic to fly as well, and I think Team Indus and PTScientists may also get off the ground. I'm hearing things about Moon Express which cause me to doubt its chances.

More on landing sites shortly.

Phil

The lander will carry a magnetometer, and landing site discussions have suggested landing at a magnetic anomaly. Early talk about this suggested landing at the well-known Reiner Gamma swirl and magnetic anomaly in Oceanus Procellarum, probably the best known such feature on the Moon. This was illustrated in a Youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRJ5HsgHhxQ


Subsequent work changed the target. Areas within about 20 degrees of the limb were off limits to avoid communication problems, and areas within about --- degrees of the equator were rejected for thermal reasons (to avoid the hottest temperatures at lunar noon). Within the northern and southern zones remaining, topographically safe sites were selected, avoiding regions with particularly low or high albedo to facilitate use of the laser altimeter. Those sites were compared with maps of magnetic anomalies and three potential sites were selected. This process is described in a 2017 LPSC abstract and poster:

LPSC abstract, 2017:

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2017/pdf/1914.pdf

associated poster:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/32...ion_to_the_Moon

(I spoke to Grossman at the meeting).


The favoured site was near Berzelius crater. I will show a map later.

Phil

This illustration shows the sites suggested for SpaceIL in the abstract and poster mentioned above.


Click to view attachment


The company which built the lander for SpaceIL is contemplating the possibility of future missions:

https://spacenews.com/iai-studying-follow-o...l-lunar-lander/


Phil

Interesting. Kinda makes me wonder if they're actually interested in finding ferrous metal deposits, presumably left by iron-nickel impactors.

SpaceIL has been running a lander name competition - I didn't know about it, but it looks like it ran on their Facebook page and they got lots of suggestions, then made a shortlist and are now asking the public to vote on names from the shortlist.

https://twitter.com/teamspaceil?lang=en

http://www.spaceil.com/


Phil

A very nice update on SpaceIL at the Planetary Society:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis...er-feature.html


In particular it contains details of the landing site, and it is one I had not seen mentioned before. The previous site information which I posted above was from an LPSC presentation, but this is different - the NW edge of Mare Serenitatis. In the earlier work mare areas were ruled out as not suitable for the use of their laser altimeter (too dark, reducing the reflected signal). Back to the (map) drawing board! (or as I call it, the kitchen table).

Phil

EDIT: Oops, here is an earlier statement:

https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-space-tea...g-for-the-moon/

I had seen it but had foolishly discounted it because of the earlier prohibition on dark mare surfaces.

Follow-on to the naming story - SpaceIL has just tweeted their name for the lander, which had been called Sparrow since the very beginning. Now it has a new name, Beresheet, meaning 'in the beginning' (or 'Genesis').

Phil

This is the new SpaceIL landing area. Launch now set for February 2019 on a rideshare Falcon 9.

Phil

Click to view attachment


EDIT: updated the map on 19 December

How high is the map calibrated? The landing site looks very smooth but it is not true if the picture is not close enough to see better about the roughness of the surface.

You are referring to the scale of the map, and as you say, at this scale we don't see small hazards. But we do see large hazards and they are nearly absent from this area. No part of the Moon is really smooth.

Phil

To refresh news from SpaceIL

http://www.moondaily.com/reports/Israeli_s...ourney_999.html

Already very soon, perhaps in two months for the launch.

The date is NET 13-February.
The ride is shared with Indonesia’s PSN-6 communications satellite.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-9-c...anetary-launch/

The 13-Feb is the date that was originally foreseen as the landing date, with launch in December 2018.
The lunar phase on Feb-13 is 8 days old, this means good timing for an early morning landing.
Of course this will not happen this way because the trip to the Moon also needs a few days.
So I expect the landing at least one month later (mid-March),
or maybe even two if they follow the original flight plan.

Best
Thorsten

PS: EDIT: "with launch in December 2018", not 2017.

Launch of SpaceIL's Beresheet Lunar Lander next Thursday (Friday UTC)!

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/18/middleea...intl/index.html

Landing on April 11, this seems less then one day from local sunrise. Interesting!

Thorsten

Somewhere (I don't find it anymore )
I read that April 11 is the date of LOI,
followed by another week of orbiting the Moon.
This would mean landing around local noon,
what makes more sense...

Thorsten

there is a good recap of the mission on the Nature website:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00634-8

SpaceIL has successfully separated from the Falcon 9 upper stage.

This LPSC abstract:

http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2019/pdf/2290.pdf

provides more detailed information on the landing site.

Phil

On this page live.spaceil.com there is a simulation of the present position of the probe.
If I calculated well, the LOI is late on April 4 (UTC) and the landing on April 12 at 05:16:17 UTC.
Is there somewhere a more detailed timeline of the mission?
Thorsten

News from today, the SpaceIL has failed with the starship tracer during a maneuver to direct the ship to the lunar surface.
For more details (in Spanish) https://www.milenio.com/ciencia-y-salud/son...alla-viaje-luna


Engineers analyze the problem, but for now, the ship is still working properly and it is going to complete its second Earth's orbit.

Looks like the maneuver was redone and went fine, apoapse is now 131,000 KM: https://twitter.com/TeamSpaceIL/status/1101222662444072973

Beresheet has conducted its fourth engine firing, a 60-sec burn, which is the final one before entering lunar orbit on 4 April. Landing due 11 April.

Times of Israel 19 March 2019

Now Beresheet is reaching the fourth apogee earth orbit. The next orbit will be the final ones?

I think it will stay in this Earth orbit, its final one, until its apogee of 4th April coincides with the arrival of the Moon at that point.
It will then fire the engine again on that date and transition into its first lunar orbit.

The spaceship: Beresheet is about two days away to be inserted into the gravity of the moon. Its orbit looks in a good way to be captured by the moon on this Thursday, April 4.

Click to view attachment

This is the landing area. The 'Aharonson et al. 2019' reference is their LPSC abstract. The enlarged image, an LRO wide-angle mosaic, shows the area of the three sites. They show up as slightly darker areas of the mare surface.

Phil

Click to view attachment

The Bereshet was already captured by the Moon's gravity

The time stamp is from CDT

Click to view attachment

A couple of pics from the far side available on IL's Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/SpaceIL

I can never get bored of pictures of the moon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMdUcchBYRA

Some great live telemetry (though narration mostly in Hebrew)!

Any idea when/if LRO will be imaging the landing site?

Looks like the main engine failed, and they lost contact soon after. Seems like a a hard impact based on the last telemetry.

Space is hard folks....

Controlled landing unssucessful, main engine failure, fantastic effort from a non govenmental enterprise.


Click to view attachment

Final telemetry


Click to view attachment

From this tweet.

Just wondering if Phil Stooke will identify the craters...

Thorsten

Well done to them - as I understand it this was far more a mission about promoting STEM education, PR, and inspiring people than it was about science. They've achieved 99% of what they hoped for just by making it into lunar orbit, so well done - even a hard lunar landing is a huge achievement.

That said, I'm seriously hoping that 'inspiring people' part means we can look forward to some new (hopefully not 150 meters/sec) private landing attempts in the not too distant future......

Yeah, Phil will definitely identify the craters!
That IMU issue and premature engine cutoff reminds me of Schiaparelli's impact (in trajectory if not in exact cause). Hopefully LRO can take a look during this lunar day or the next.

My hats off to the team; an incredible achievement, and apparently they still win the million dollars for the X-Prize contest (no other team even got to launch!)

The crater should be Hypatia A.
looking North East into Mare Tranquilitatis.
Still over 1000km from the landing point.
(Credits for identification go to @Henning81 from the German astronomie.de)

Thorsten

Here's the first image, reprojected a bit to help identify it ...

Click to view attachment

The crater near the limb is Burg in Lacus Mortis, 45 north, 28 east.

Click to view attachment

That's a bit off the landing longitude. Was it from a previous orbit?

Phil

And the second. As was said already, it's Hypatia at 4 south, 22 east. Looking northeast from one of the four side-mounted cameras which would have taken the surface panorama.

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Far south of the landing site, so although just released, presumably it must be from an earlier orbit.

Phil

I have to say, it somewhat alarmed me to see that photo and identify it as the spur of highlands south of the Apollo 11 landing site. It's the feature I use as a finder to zero in on that location. I'm sure I don't know the entire Moon that well, but that's one spot that I do.

On April 5, Space News reported that the lander fired its main engine for six minutes, slowing the spacecraft by about 1,000 kilometers per hour.

https://spacenews.com/spaceil-lander-enters-lunar-orbit/

These numbers work out to 0.77 meters per second squared acceleration, which is less than half of lunar surface gravity. Landing from a low lunar orbit needs about half of the spacecraft to be propellant, so after burning that off, the deceleration capability would still be less than lunar surface gravity. So if the reported numbers correctly represent full thrust from the main engine, there would not have been enough thrust to land.

Does anyone know the correct numbers for the orbit insertion burn last week, or is it true that there simply was not enough thrust?

Otherwise, what did I miss in my calculation? A million meters per hour in 6 minutes is 278 m/s in 360 s, or 0.77 m/s^2.

I'm not sure you missed anything. According to the Wikipedia entry, Beresheet has a dry mass of 150kg and a Leros 2b engine capable of 407N thrust. If we assume it's near-dry at landing, that gives it 2.7 m/s^2 acceleration, which should be fine for a lunar landing.

The fueled mass is more like 585kg, of which I think they'd used about 100kg of fuel at that point, which works out to 0.90 m/s^2, perhaps within the uncertainty of our napkin-based calculations. Presumably, the rest of the fuel is used up lowering the apolune and during the descent maneuver, though I haven't been able to find any clear description of the engine firing for those maneuvers.

any idea whether the expected magnetometer data to be collected during orbits and descent have been obtained?

News today:

Leonard David reports LRO's LOLA laser will attempt to get a reflection from the ball-shaped reflector, if it survived the crash.

http://www.leonarddavid.com/did-nasa-exper...el-moon-lander/

No word yet on if any magnetometer results were transmitted.

Kahn will begin a Beresheet 2 mission right away. Flight in 2 or 3 years.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/spaceil-chief...ag-on-the-moon/


Phil

LIVE BROADCAST URL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMdUcchBYRA

This undated image was shown at 18:35 in the recorded live broadcast. Phil and Thorsten have correctly identified the lunar location as Hypatia A.

The Beresheet selfie photo was shown at 31:33 during the live broadcast. Further work shows that it could not have been taken during the descent.

Following is a listing of the events which I observed while reviewing the live broadcast video.

All times, below, are video recording time stamps.

18:35 A photo taken at an unknown time and lunar location is shown during the live broadcast.

Up until the following video time stamps, neither the telemetry indicator nor the horizontal velocity value is green. Altitude and vertical velocity are shown in yellow.

23:03 Telemetry indicator turns green. Sub State is Orientation.

25:04 Sub State changes to Braking.

25:20 "We are past the point of no return."

25:26 The Point of No Return indicator turns black.

25:52 Vertical velocity display turns green.

28:16 Telemetry indicator is no longer green.

28:20 Telemetry indicator momentarily turns green, then is no longer green.

29.37 Distance is shown as 210 km.

29:50 Distance changes to 385 km.

30:03 Distance changes to 370 km.

30:40 Telemetry indicator is green.

30:51 Distance is 314 km.

31:33 Beresheet selfie is shown. Altitude approx 22 km??? Telemetry is green.

31:50 Telemetry indicator is no longer green.

31:55 to 32:29 "[inaudible] kill it." "[More inaudible mission chatter] busy."

32:48 Telemetry screen is shown. Telemetry indicator is light yellow. Altitude is 14095 m. Horizontal velocity is 955.5 m/s. Vertical velocity is 24.8 m/s. Main engine is on. Horizontal velocity is light yellow. Other parameters are green, except for the telemetry indicator.

32:49 All engines are on.

32:51 All engines are off.

32:55 Main engine is on.

32:57 All engines are on.

32:59 Main engine is on. Distance is 183.8 km.

33:01 - 33:03 "IMUstein not okay."

33:02 All engines are on.

33:05 Main engine is on.

33:07 All engines are on.

33:09 Main engine is on.

33:11 All engines are on.

33:13 Main engine is on.

33:16 All engines are on.

33:20 Telemetry indicator turns green. All engines are off. All displays remain static (no change).

33:32 Telemetry indicator is no longer green. All engines are off. All displays remain static (no change).

34:24 Telemetry indicator turns green. All engines are off, yet supposedly turn on. Vertical acceleration on the Z axis is fixed at 0.6. "We currently have a problem in one of our inertial measurement units." Vertical velocity starts to steadily increase. Altitude continues to steadily decrease. Vertical acceleration on the Z axis becomes fixed at 0.6. Main engine probably is not on.

Telemetry indicator intermittently turns green and then turns light yellow, up until the following video time stamp.

34:56 Telemetry indicator is no longer green. Although all engines are shown as on, vertical velocity continues to increase. Vertical acceleration on the Z axis remains fixed at 0.6. Main engine probably is not on.

36:25 - 36:33 "We seem to have a problem with our main engine. We are resetting the spacecraft to try to enable the engine."

36:40 Telemetry indicator is green. All engines appear to be on, yet Z axis acceleration remains fixed at 0.6 m/s. Altitude is 678 meters. Horizontal and vertical velocities are 948.1 m/s and 130.1 m/s respectively.

36:44 Last telemetry data. Telemetry indicator is green. All engines appear to be on. Z axis acceleration changes to 0.7 m/s. Final altitude is 149 meters. Final horizontal and vertical velocities are 946.7 and 134.3 m/s respectively. Main engine does not appear to be functioning properly.

Hypatia A

Here is a LRO QuickMap link to match the Beresheet photo:

http://bit.ly/2P984hh

And attached is the correctly orientated Beresheet photo.

Beresheet's last photo...

My correctly orientated and enhanced version of Beresheet's last published selfie photo is attached. The large crater seen in the distance (top and to the left of the flag) is Burg.

Here is a LRO QuickMap 3D link for the photo:

http://bit.ly/2P5MQkj

Click to view attachmentLRO QuickMap 2D and 3D screen captures, and QuickMap links for the screen captures...

BERESHEET FLIGHT PATH FROM SELFIE TO PLANNED LANDING SITE (2D):

This is NOT the correct flight path. I assumed that the selfie photo shown live was taken either just before or during descent:

http://bit.ly/2Pbqspx


BERESHEET FLIGHT PATH FROM SELFIE TO PLANNED LANDING SITE (3D):

This is NOT the correct flight path. I assumed that the selfie photo shown live was taken either just before or during descent:

http://bit.ly/2P7DIvw

The terrain from Beresheet's last selfie photo and the intended landing site...

This is not the correct flight path for the descent.

"https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/bd34il/hi_my_name_is_ben_nathaniel_i_work_on_the_team_of/"

Reddit has this 'ask me anything' with a spaceIL team member. Among other things it confirms that the Hypatia image was taken 4 hours before the landing attempt (2 orbits earlier). I suspect that the Lacus Mortis image was taken on that orbit or the next. I don't think it can be from the descent, so I don't think a path can be mapped from the image location to the landing site. The time of image release is not indicative of when it was taken. The Reddit does say that there is another image not yet released, possibly from the actual descent. It also appears that there is some magnetometer data taken and probably on the ground.

Phil