Beresheet is going to the moon

Beresheet, the first Israeli spaceship to the moon, after 42 days in space, completed a critical maneuver and now orbiting the moon and not the Earth.

5/4/2019- First photo of the moon
After examining the preliminary data received during the night from Beresheet by the engineering team of SpaceIL and IAI, the control room updates that Beresheet is in an excellent orbit!
The nearest point to the moon (Perilune) is 470 km from the moon and the point farthest from the moon (Apolune) at a distance of 10,400 km.
The landing is scheduled for April 11 approximately 23:00 Israeli time - an accurate update will be published in the coming days. During the coming week, the maneuvers intense preparations for the landing will be conducted.
Yesterday during the critical Lunar Capture maneuver, "Beresheet" photographed amazing photos of the moon while activating the engines.

1-A picture taken by Beresheet - the far side of the moon during the maneuver at 470 km height
2-A picture of the far side of the moon with Earth in the background

A picture taken by Beresheet - the far side of the moon during the maneuver at 470 km height

A picture of the far side of the moon with Earth in the background

4/4/2019 - Lunar capture

See the entire maneuver in this video



YEHUD, Israel, April 4 – SpaceIL’s engineering team and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) this evening at 5:17 p.m. Israel team conducted the most critical maneuver to date of Beresheet’s journey to the moon – the Lunar Capture. This maneuver enabled the spacecraft to be captured by the moon’s gravity and begin orbiting the moon – and with the moon, orbiting the Earth.

Today’s maneuver moved the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit around the moon, with the closest point (perilune) 500 km to the moon, with the farthest point (apolune) 10,000 km from the moon. Unlike the longer orbits around the Earth, Beresheet’s first lunar orbit will last 14 hours. Before it lands on the moon, each orbit thereafter will take only two hours. At the beginning of this week, Beresheet reached, for the last time, the closest point to Earth in its last Earth orbit, only 1,700 km, and continued on course to the point where it could join the lunar orbit, 400,000 km from Earth.

At 5:18 p.m. Israel time the spacecraft’s engine activated for six minutes, and reduced its speed by 1,000 km/hour, from 8,500 km/hour to 7,500 km/hour, relative to the moon’s velocity. The maneuver was conducted with full communication between Beresheet’s control room in Israel and the spacecraft, and signals in real time match the correct course. In the coming week, with expected intense engineering activities, many more maneuvers will take Beresheet from an elliptical to a round orbit, at a height of 200 km from the moon. The maneuvers will aim to reduce the spacecraft’s distance from the moon and reach the optimal point to conduct an autonomic landing in the Sea of Serenity in the evening Israel time, April 11.

SpaceIL Chairman, Morris Kahn: “The lunar capture is an historic event in and of itself – but it also joins Israel in a seven-nation club that has entered the moon’s orbit. A week from today we’ll make more history by landing on the moon, joining three super powers who have done so. Today I am proud to be an Israeli.”

SpaceIL CEO, Ido Anteby: “After six weeks in space, we have succeeded in overcoming another critical stage by entering the moon’s gravity. This is another significant achievement our engineering team achieved while demonstrating determination and creativity in finding solutions to unexpected challenges. We still have a long way until the lunar landing, but I‘m convinced our team will complete the mission to land the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon, making us all proud.”

IAI CEO, Nimrod Sheffer: “After a challenging journey, we made tonight another Israeli record and became the seventh nation to orbit the moon. Even before Beresheet was launched, it already was a national success story that shows our groundbreaking technological capabilities. Tonight, we again reach new heights. In the coming week, our talented engineering team will work 24/7 to bring us to an historic event on April 11. Good luck Beresheet.”

For several years, SpcaceIL builds the first private Israeli spaceship to go the moon. Initiated as part of Google Lunar X-prize, three "dreamers": Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari,Yonatan Winetraub established SpaceIL, raise funds and experts and made the dream into reality.

Beresheet - Genesis spacecraft

SpaceIL is a non-profit organization established in 2011 aiming to land the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon. SpaceIL was founded by three young engineers competing for the international Google Lunar XPRIZE challenge to build, launch and land an unmanned lunar spacecraft. SpaceIL’s other stated goal is to inspire the next generation in Israel and around the world to choose to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

If you visited Israel in the last years you probably saw a small model of Beresheet in the airport, asking for people to do selfie with the model. Some of the photos will go to the moon, maybe even mine.

Selfie with Beresheet (and my sister)

The Spacecraft - The process of planning and developing the spacecraft, which includes the intensive work of engineers, scientists and staff, began in 2013 and continued until last year. The spacecraft, which weighs only 600 kilograms, is considered the smallest to land on the moon. It is only 1.5 meters wide and will be carrying about 75 percent of its weight. Its maximum speed will exceed 10 kilometers per second (36,000 km / h).

The spacecraft passed two critical tests: Vacuum chamber test and Hyper-sonic chamber tests and is ready to be packed and start its journey to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the launch.

Bereshhet entering the Vacuum Chamber. Credit IAI

Bereseheet in a Hyper-sonic chamber

The spacecraft's journey to the Moon - Once launched, the spacecraft will begin with a long and complex flight. The spacecraft will disengage from the SpaceX launch rocket when it reaches 60,000 kilometers from Earth’s surface and begin orbiting the Earth in elliptic orbits. It will circle Earth, widening its circumference each time, while saving fuel and only starting the engines at the end of each cycle. Then, at the right time, it will leave Earth’s gravity and enter the gravity of the moon. After circling the moon a few times, it will begin the landing process, carried out autonomously by the spacecraft's navigation control system. The entire flight, from launch through landing, will take about two months.

The mission - Once the spacecraft, carrying the Israeli flag, lands on the moon in April 2019, it will begin taking photos of the landing site. It will also perform measurements of the magnetic field in a scientific experiment carried out in cooperation with the Weizmann Institute and NASA. The data collected from this experiment will be transferred to IAI's control room during the two days following the landing.

Much better selfie with Bereshhet

Now,  Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) presented today at IAI’s Space Division a time capsule that will travel to the moon — and remain there indefinitely — with the first Israeli spacecraft, which will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in February, 2019.

The time capsule consists of three discs, each containing hundreds of digital files. Included among the files, which will travel to the moon inside SpaceIL’s lunar spacecraft, are: Details about the spacecraft and the crew building it; national symbols, like Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the Bible, Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah”, and the Israeli flag; cultural objects; materials – paintings, for example – collected over many years from the public for sending to the moon; dictionaries in 27 languages and encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, an indication of knowledge accumulated by all humanity thus far; Israeli songs; the Wayfarer’s Prayer; books of art and science and Israeli literature; information about Israeli scientific and technological discoveries and developments that influenced the world; photos Israel’s landscapes and of leading figures in Israeli culture; a children’s book that was inspired by SpaceIL’s mission to the moon.

The three founders and the time capsule

The time capsule, along with the spacecraft, will remain on the Moon indefinitely, even after completing Israel’s first lunar mission. With no plans to return to Earth, the spacecraft and information within the time capsule’s disks will possibly be found and distributed by future generations.

In early 2019, the spacecraft, recently named Beresheet (the Hebrew word for Genesis), will launch alongside other satellites as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The precise launch date remains undetermined, as SpaceIL awaits final confirmation from the launch company.

Closer look on the time capsule

"This is another step on our way to the moon," said Ido Anteby, CEO of SpaceIL. “Inserting the disks into the spacecraft, which is a real "time capsule," indicates the spacecraft's readiness to blast off from the launch site in a few weeks. SpaceIL's crews and IAI have completed testing of the spacecraft and its systems, and are preparing for the beginning of the amazing and complex journey that exemplifies innovation, creativity and courage. The spacecraft's historic journey, which also includes a scientific mission, makes a significant contribution to advancing the space industry and the subject of space in Israel."

Yonatan Winetraub, one of three SpaceIL founders, said, as he inserted the time capsule into a spacecraft: "This is a very emotional moment. We do not know how long the spacecraft and the time capsule will remain on the moon. It is very possible that future generations will find this information and want to learn more about this historic moment."

Here is a short video showing the insertion of the time capsule:

Opher Doron, IAI’s Space Division General Manager, said: "We are proud to be the first non-governmental entity in the world to go to the moon. Landing on the moon was for many years a little-discussed topic among the public, but recently we see growing interest as world superpowers seek to return to the moon in a variety of commercial missions. There is no doubt that the technological knowledge acquired by IAI during the development and construction of Beresheet, together with Space IL and combined with the space capabilities developed over more than 30 years at IAI, puts us at the global forefront in the ability to complete lunar missions."

The spacecraft, whose construction was carried out at IAI’s Space Division, successfully completed a series of recent tests to examine the integration of systems, and a series of complex experiments aimed at testing its durability. Concurrently, validation and verification tests checked the function of the spacecraft in scenarios it could experience during the mission. Since actual space conditions cannot be replicated, tests are carried out in part by a SpaceIL simulator that mimics space conditions and part on the spacecraft itself. Next, SpaceIL will soon ship the spacecraft to the launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

In October, SpaceIL and the Israeli Space Agency announced a collaboration with NASA that will enable SpaceIL to improve its ability to track and communicate with the spacecraft before, during, and after landing on the moon. Two weeks ago a retro-reflector from NASA was installed on the spacecraft, an instrument that reflects laser beams and will enable NASA to precisely locate the spacecraft on the lunar surface after the landing. SpaceIL, the Israel Space Agency and NASA also agreed that NASA will have access to data gathered by the magnetometer installed aboard the Israeli spacecraft. The instrument, which was developed in collaboration with Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, will measure the magnetic field on and above the landing site.

Please find below photos from today’s event at IAI’s Space Division and examples of photos the will be included in the time capsule.

The launch will take place on a SpaceX rocket in first quarter of 2019, and the Moon landing will be at the end of a two-month journey in space. Since the establishment of SpaceIL, the task of landing an Israeli spacecraft on the moon has become a national project, with educational impact, funded by donors such as Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, Sami Sagol, Lynn Schusterman, Steven and Nancy Grand, Sylvan Adams and others. Morris Kahn, a philanthropist and businessman, took the lead in completing the mission, financing about NIS 100 million of the project and serving as SpaceIL’s president.

About Israel Aerospace Industries:

IAI Ltd. is Israel’s largest aerospace and defense company and a globally recognized technology and innovation leader, specializing in developing and manufacturing advanced, state-of-the-art systems for air, space, sea, land, cyber and homeland security. Since 1953, the company has provided advanced technology solutions to government and commercial customers worldwide including: satellites, missiles, weapon systems and munitions, unmanned and robotic systems, radars, C4ISR and more. IAI also designs and manufactures business jets and aerostructures, performs overhaul and maintenance on commercial aircraft and converts passenger aircraft to refueling and cargo configurations. http://www.iai.co.il/ 

The best images from Cassini for 2015

With all the attention to New Horizons and Pluto lets not forget the veteran spaceship Cassini which makes wonders around Saturn and sometimes it seems as there is an artist photographer sitting there to get these great compositions.
Cassini is now on its 219's Rev around Saturn. The orbit is very elliptical and spans from about 200,000km to over 2,000,000km. Such an orbit is required to measure Saturn's gravitational field and also give chance to flybys around the moons. Each Rev is well planned in advance and is fully using the time to observe Saturn and the moons.

Here are some of the best photos of 2015

You can see many more at Cassini's website and I've added a link for each photo for more explanations and details in that website.

All photos are courtesy of NASA 

Lets start with an old photo which is not very familiar. This is a very known object from a completly different angel.

Southern pole of Jupiter: Cassini. NASA

This is an old photo of Jupiter when Cassini passed near him in the previous decade. The angle is unique. Never before we saw Jupiter from down under! The great red spot and the entire clouds' bands are visible in this magnificent image.

What do you see in the following unreal picture? Obviously you see the ring but what is behind the ring? It is the ring shadow in Saturn surface! Cubist art in its best.

Modern art in Saturn's rings

 This is moon Rhea. do I see that it also has a heart shape on it or is is my imagination?

Rhea

 A flying sponge? That's what most people think of Hyperion

Hyperion

And Tethys looks just like the death star from star-wars (Me and the children are eagerly waiting for episode VII!)

Tethys

Dione is beautifully aligned on Saturn ring which is extremely narrow in this photo. The dark silhouette of Saturn is a great background.

Dione

 Three moons in one shot and all of them thin crescent. hoe can that happen?

Titan Mimas and Rhea

Who's who? The large object is Saturn! look carefully for the thin ring in the right middle. The small object is Titan which is a very large moon but small in front of giant Saturn.

Saturn and Titan

 Janus and a tiny fraction of the rings below

Janus

Previous articles about Cassini and Saturn:

• Planet Saturn
• Cassini's highlight from 2012
• Cassini's highlights from 2013

Pluto and New Horizons

New horizons is finally arriving distant Pluto. After almost ten years the flyby is just hours away early on July 14th 2015. The spaceship will neither land on Pluto nor orbit it, but will pass in a mere distance of 11,000KM from its surface giving us unprecedented details and information about it.

I am updating this post frequently both with new photos and images but also with historic information. Don't miss the chance to find Pluto yourself looking at two original images from the Lowell observatory

14/7/2015 - Today is the day
Want to be super updated?
Check NASA-TV and @NASANewHorizons on twitter
As expected NASA released a very good photo just before the PR. While new data will arrive only in about 12 hours after the flyby you can have a small taste with thie fine photo

Pluto from 76000Km. NASA

Latest briefing from NASA (short 15-20 min Video, updated daily).

Recent update

13/7/2015 - Find Pluto yourself!!

This is Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto in 1930 when he was 24 years old.

Clyde Tombaugh. Source: Lowell observatory

Finding Pluto was not easy and required to scan thousands of photographic plates to notice small differences. Although there were no airplanes or satellite it was a hard task. Today computers are doing it in seconds. Here are the two original photos. Clyde Tombaugh had a special instrument on which he could flipped two photos. and if he looked carefully enough he would see a difference. Most photos has no difference and even if they had, most of them were specks of dust. But eventually one was a new planet. You can try for yourself using the following two photos. Where is Pluto? (Click on the photo to see it bigger and easily change to the second photo. Try go back and forth between the two). Answers at the end of the article but do try to find yourself!

Where is Pluto 1 (Lowell Observatory)

Where is Pluto 2 (Lowell Observatory)

12/7/2015 - Why Pluto is not a planet anymore
The decision to move Pluto out of the planet's list is because several reasons:
1) Its orbits is very elongated  and inclined to the ecliptic
2) There are many small bodies like it in the Kuiper Belt
3) He is not big enough and is more to be considered as a binary system together with Charon
However the IAU (International Astronomical Union) had some hard time to define the exact rules in its 2006 conference. For further reading you can look at my review of Mike Brown's "How I killed Pluto" book.

13/7/2015 - Chasms on Charon

The newest photo of Charon is very interesting. A possible impact craters and a huge chasm relatively larger and deeper than the grand canyon.

כארון 11/7/2015 - 4 מיליון קילומטטר. נאסא

What happens during the flyby?

The following info-graphic says it all. Many measurements with all the instruments on board. Just before the flyby a short transmission of the latest photos to Earth, probably for the PR section, and then 4 to 6 intensive hours of work, and only at the end a transmission of just a fraction of the data is planned. Want to see more? Check the eyes on NASA site

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11/7/2015 

This 6Million KM photo of Pluto shows interesting feature. What is the Polygon?.

Pluto from 6 Million KM. NASA

Here is more or less the same photo but from 4 Million km.

Pluto from 4 Million KM. NASA

Pluto and Charon. NASA

Here is an example of how demanding is the communicating task. The entire NASA's Goldstone station is communicating with New-Horizons. check yourself in DSN now. It changes during the day, but that is a good example.

All antennas at Goldstone are pointing toward New-Horizons

9/7/2015 - The heart of Pluto

We love these photos. We can imagine things, and this shape is called the heart of Pluto. does it look like a heart? Not really, but our mind tends to look or familiar features so even this approximation is enough. The "Heart" length is about 2000km and is probably new layers of frost gases such as Methane. The dark feature left to the heart is called "The whale". 

Pluto's heart. NASA

Would you think that it is a hear if you saw this photo first? I am not sure

Pluto's heart. NASA

The superb space blog - Universe Today gave a list of all not required things in the spaceship. usually objects to give some emotional aspect to the mission. Here is the summary from UT site (with permission)

1. Some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh making him the human that reached the further away from earth,
2. A CD with 430,00 names of people who registered at NASA site. I am not one of them, but this has become a routine so check out and list your name in future missions.
3. Another CD with images of the entire mission's members.
4. A quarter from Florida. If ET will need to call home.
5. A flag of Maryland
6. Two flags of the USA
7. A small piece of Spaceship 1
8. A stamp from 1991 with the caption: Pluto - not researched yet

The spaceship itself looks like a big piano. Here are two photos from two different angles

New Horizons. NASA

New Horizons. NASA

So where is Pluto? You will find it much easier in these photos

Pluto - the moving dot. Lowell observatory

Pluto - the moving dot. Lowell observatory

 

DSN celebrates fifty!

It really doesn't matter how good your spaceship is, where it is going or which great photos it took, if that information will not reach back to Earth, the entire effort will be in vain.
One of the greatest things that NASA did, if not the biggest wonder, is the Deep Space Network (DSN) which celebrates its fiftieth birthday.
The DSN is a marvelous engineering piece of work supporting spacecrafts as old as fifty with all different kinds of communications methods, bandwidths and protocols. The network supports  mission of close and extremely far from earth up to 19 Billion kilometers, as well as connecting with other networks which supports Low earth orbits satellites.
The network is the heart of all NASA's operations and one of the most critical assets of the planetary research.

The network has three bases spread over the entire globe. One center is in California, the second is in Spain and the third is in Australia. In those centers there are many dishes. The biggest ones are 70m in diameter and are used to receive the weak signals from Voyager 1 missions. It takes 18 hours to the signal to reach Earth. The download speed is awfully low, just 120 bits (yes bits, not Mbits) per second. In the beginning of Voyager mission and when it was closer to Earth the speed was much higher but the far distance and the need to conserve energy slowed it down.

The 70 meter dish at Goldston California

But Voyager is not the only mission in the solar system. There are dozens of other missions and all need their communication time-slots. Each mission has different protocol, bands, frequencies and the antennas must be pointed very accurately. Managing the operation is a 24 hours job and not an easy one.
The network starts to work from a distance of 15000km from Earth. A spacecraft in this distance will always "see" at least one of the network's bases. The ISS and other satellites use different network system.
The antenna are always working and although they need maintenance there is currently no plan to do it. Such activities will bring down its networking abilities for long time and will prevent the normal operations of the missions. Keeping the DSN up and running is a major challenge for NASA in the coming years.

To celebrate the 50th birthday of the networks, NASA created a site -DSN Now- which will show you which antenna is "speaking" with which spaceship. I got addicted.



NASA's DSN site

Gravity (movie)

It seems like the entire space and astronomy community is talking about Gravity. It is indeed a great film you should watch it in 3D. The new film, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, presents Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as two astronauts who got stuck outside their spaceship. During a routine service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, the Russians sent a missile to destroy an old satellite (something the Chinese has actually done in the past). The debris' cloud spreads quickly and destroys Bullock and Clooney's space shuttle. The ISS team abandon it, and so does the Chinese in their Tiangong station. Our heroes are left alone to find their long way home.

The film is minimalistic. Bullock and Clooney are the only actors. There are some voices like Ed Harris as the capcom (Harris played flight director Gene Kranz in Apollo 13) but the most astonishing thing is the view of Space. I was very happy to see that one of the first places seen clearly on Earth is my country, Israel, together with the Sinai desert and Egypt.

Is the film realistic? The danger of debris is real. Of course there are errors in the film and you can search and find a whole list of them on the net. The debris cloud speed is too high and in this speed it will not orbit the Earth but continue to outer space. Hubble ,the ISS and Tiangogng, are in entirely different orbits and it is hard to go from one to another and so on. There is no point to search for errors, the point is to enjoy the film and the feeling of actually being there in space hovering above Earth. In the film we go through most of the existing spaceships. A space shuttle (now retired), the ISS, a Soyuz spaceship and the Chinese Tiangong which is much bigger that the real thing. Astronauts said the the spacecrafts look very real with all the handles and the buttons in the correct places, and it certainly looks real to the audience.

There is a lot of physics in the film. Children from grades 4 to 12 can learn a lot from it. Newton's second law of motion is demonstrated throughout the entire film and all the following terms: mass, velocity, acceleration, force, moment, vector, drag, pressure, energy, friction, lift, elastic and so on, are in the film. A guided view of the film can help to teach all these terms with the entire laws of mechanics.

However if you do looking for errors you will find quite a few. Here are some:

• The Hubble Space Telescope ,Tiangong and the ISS are in totally different orbits. They are not in the same height and not in the same place moving in tandem. It is impossible to move  from one to another like the astronauts do in the film.
• The debris cloud is moving too fast. In that speed it will not orbit Earth but proceed deeper into space.
• When Bullock removes her spacesuit, she has only regular clothes underneath. In reality, there are many more layers on an astronauts body.
• The Tiangong (Chinese space station) is like it might be in ten more years, but maybe the film is in the future (The STS number is 157 and the last one was 135, of course space shuttle are retired now)

For a very long list of errors (With spoilers) look in the comment I received in Reddit.

Gravity. All the rights are reserve to Warner Bros.

During the film Bullock is trying to have a radio converstaion with someone named Anningaaq. This is a corss-refernce to a short movie (7 minutes only) of the director's son: Jonas Cuaron. Watch the short film here. This cross refrence reminded me the masterpiece book by Chinghiz Aitmatov: "The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years".


After saying all the above, I will repeat my recommendation to see this film. Not because of the reality and not due to screenplay. The real star is space itself. 3D or IMAX are a must. Gravity is joining the hall of fame of space movies and we will probably hear a lot the sentence: "And the Oscar goes to Gravity". 

Watch the official trailer.

Additional links

How to see the ISS

The space shuttle

Cassini's images

The Cassini spaceship is orbiting Saturn for many year now and always manage to amaze. On the 19th of July Cassini will take a photograph of planet earth while Saturn blocks the sun. This will be a reproduction of the iconic photo from 2006 and a good chance to compare and see any difference. You can watch the 2006 photo in the following article together with many more photos of earth from space.
To celebrate the event I've collected some of the best photos of Cassini from 2012-2013. There many more and it is hard to choose from. Enjoy! Credit to all photographs is to NASA.

Saturn and Titan

Enceladus looks like a popped balloon.

Enceladus

A huge storm on Saturn

A huge storm on Saturn

A closeup of Enceladus. Jets of gases are vaporizing into outer space

A closeup of Enceladus

Two tiny moons: Prometheus and Pandora

Prometheus and Pandora

The surface of the moon Rhea. Rhea is one of the moons that can be seen with even a small telescope from earth.

Rhea

Is this river Nile? Might be an old river on the surface of Titan

Saturn in the dark. Saturn covers the Sun, but the rings are lighted and reflect light back on Saturn which gives an extraordinary result.

Saturn in the dark

Saturn

Saturn

Saturn shading its rings. Notice some tiny dot and the upper left area - a tiny moon.

Saturn shading its rings

This photo is the first photo of meteors not from Earth. Read more about these meteors.

Meteors striking Saturn

This is not Saturn. This is Titan with little moon Dione with the rings as a background.

Titan with little moon Dione

A vortex on Titan

A vortex on Titan

And from another angle

A vortex on Titan

And a closeup

A vortex on Titan

Saturn is blocking the sun. At the upper left a small dot. This is not Earth but Venus.

Venus from Saturn

Strange things happens on Saturn's north pole

Saturn's north pole

You probably remember the incredible transit of Venus (well the whole site started from it). Anyway this is a Venus transit from Saturn. Read more here.

Venus transit from Saturn

For further reading:
Saturn
More images from Cassini