SpaceIL
Last Thursday, Israel's Beresheet lander took these photos of the Moon's surface just as the four-legged spacecraft fired its main engine to insert itself into lunar orbit. The far side of the Moon, shown above, was taken by Beresheet from an altitude of 470 kilometers (292 miles) above the ancient craters. In the pic below, Earth is visible about 386,160 kilometers (240,000 miles) away as the lunar lander ventured near the sunlit side of the Moon during the orbit-insertion maneuver.
Over the next four days, the flight team at SpaceIL in Israel will conduct final checks and make sure that all calculations are correct and complete as Beresheet hopefully makes its historic landing at Mare Serenitatis ("Sea of Serenity") this Thursday, April 11. Beresheet will then go from giving Israel the honor of being the seventh nation to orbit the Moon [behind the United States (whose Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is still operational at Earth's closest celestial neighbor), the former Soviet Union, India, China, the European Space Agency and Japan (which sent its Kaguya orbiter to the Moon in 2007)] to attaining the prestigious title of becoming the first country to soft-land a privately-funded spacecraft on the lunar surface. Of course, this would complement Israel's position of being the fourth nation (behind the United States, the former Soviet Union and China) to land a robotic probe on the Moon, overall. Very exciting!
SpaceIL
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