Israeli President Reuven Rivlin on Wednesday unveiled the Beresheet 2 project, the second Israeli lunar mission to be sent to the moon following the crash landing of the first lander last year
TEL AVIV (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th December, 2020) Israeli President Reuven Rivlin on Wednesday unveiled the Beresheet 2 project, the second Israeli lunar mission to be sent to the moon following the crash landing of the first lander last year.
The mission is expected to be launched in 2024. It will consist of three spacecraft an orbiter and two landers.
"Today, we are setting out on a new path, familiar but different, at the end of which we hope to land three spacecraft safely on the moon," Rivlin said at his residence in Jerusalem, where he hosted the launch of the project.
The original Beresheet spacecraft managed to transmit a selfie with the Israeli flag on the background of the lunar surface before it had an engine malfunction and ultimately lost contact with the ground control center.
"Just a year and a half ago, we were here together, when Israel held its breath and looked to the stars. We anxiously watched the Beresheet spacecraft on its historic journey to the moon. ... We were disappointed, and realized that we had to start once again from the beginning," Rivlin noted.
The first Israeli mission to the moon was launched on February 22 from a US cosmodrome at Cape Canaveral by means of the Falcon 9 rocket. It had flown 6.5 million kilometers (4 million miles), while its speed reached 36,000 kilometers per hour. One week later, Beresheet made it to the lunar orbit, making Israel the seventh country in the world that managed to do this.
A successful touchdown would have made Beresheet not only the first private spacecraft to carry out a moon landing, but would also have made Israel the fourth nation on Earth to reach the surface of the Earth's natural satellite after the Soviet Union, the United States and China.
