The moon lander reached the surface of the moon, but not as planned.
As you know from one of my recent posts,
https://steemit.com/news/@improvisation/israel-becomes-the-4th-nation-landing-on-the-moon-look-the-live-broadcast-of-the-moon-landing
yesterday was the landing procedure of the Moon Lander Beresheet.
In the beginning the landing started as planned. The braking process worked well. The velocity of the spacecraft slowed down. And the lander done exactly what it supposed to do.
This selfie was taken by the space probe from an altitude about 22 km thanks the NASA's DSN (Deep Space Network) operated by NASA's JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory).
The first technical issue occurred at 14 km above the Moon caused the main engine to shut down. Then the communication with JPL was lost. Only the connection through SSC (Swedish Space Corporation) existed. During this time Beresheet lost a lot of height and it was impossible to slow down the spacecraft's descent.
After the complete connection returned, the engine was restarted but the velocity was too high to land properly.
At 150 meters the probe was moving at 500 km/h, making a collision inevitable.
It was a very significant event in Israel and many people watched the live broadcast. Despite the achievement of beeing the 7th country orbited the moon, many children were disappointed. At least they can be proud, reached the surfaces of the 380.000 km far moon.
The re-elected prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu asked SpaceIL: "how long it would take to bring a secound lander to the moon?" They answered: "2 to 3 years"
So maybe we will see in a few years a second try of Israel to get on the moon...
source: youtube.com/watch?v=HMdUcchBYRA https://twitter.com/TeamSpaceIL
