Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think
- Beresheet about to become 21st craft to make soft landing on moon
- Israel joins China in restarting the ‘race to the moon’
- Interactive map shows timeline, origin and locations of all lunar landings
Four countries on the moon
The four lunar superpowers in one map: the Soviets (Luna 9), the Americans (Apollo 11), the Chinese (Chang’e 3) and the Israelis (Beresheet).
Beresheet is the first word in the Hebrew Bible, often translated as “In the beginning” (or ‘Genesis’). It’s also the name of an unmanned Israeli spacecraft that is scheduled to land on the moon this Thursday at around 10 pm (Israeli time; 3 pm Eastern Time).
Close to that time, check Contact GBS for updates and a live feed of the landing.
If and when Beresheet successfully touches down in the Sea of Serenity, Israel will be only the fourth country to land a craft on the moon. Only the United States, the Soviet Union and China have already done so.
The Israeli craft will break a few records of its own. Privately funded, Beresheet will be the first non-governmental space ship on the moon. With a height of just 5 feet (1.5 m) and weighing no more than 1,322 pounds (600 kg), it will also be the smallest lunar lander ever.
The craft is equipped with cameras to snap pictures of the lunar surface and equipment to measure the moon’s magnetic fields. But the trip is also about national pride and rememberance: Beresheet carries an Israeli flag, a copy of the country’s Declaration of Independence and a recording of the national anthem – plus a bible and a digital time capsule (containing among many other things the Jewish Traveler’s Prayer and the testimonial of a Holocaust survivor).
America’s most eccentric landing
Most U.S. landings stuck to the same neighbourhood. Geographically speaking, Surveyor 7 was America’s most eccentric lunar landing.
Beresheet will be landing in the middle of the Sea of Serenity, in a relatively crowded area (as lunar regions go): roughly halfway between the landing site of Apollo 15, which touched down in July 1971 and…
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