astronomy

SpaceIL

SpaceIL is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand SpaceIL rather than just read about it. In short: SpaceIL is an Israeli private non profit association, established in 2011, that competed in the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) contest to land a spacecraft on the Moon by private organization. SpaceIL successfully launched its Beresheet lander on 22 February 2019 at 01:45 UTC; it entered lunar orbit on 4 April 2019 at 14:18 UTC.

Key takeaways

SpaceIL belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect SpaceIL to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of SpaceIL from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

SpaceIL is an Israeli private non profit association, established in 2011, that competed in the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) contest to land a spacecraft on the Moon by private organization. SpaceIL successfully launched its Beresheet lander on 22 February 2019 at 01:45 UTC; it entered lunar orbit on 4 April 2019 at 14:18 UTC. On 11 April 2019, during the landing procedure, a problem occurred in the final stage of the landing process. Consequently, communications were lost with the spacecraft, long enough for the speed braking process to fail, and the vehicle crashed on the lunar surface. The Beresheet mission had included plans to measure the Moon's magnetic field at the landing site, and was carrying a laser retroreflector, and a "time capsule" containing analog and digital information, created by the Arch Mission Foundation. Beresheet was the first Israeli spacecraft to travel beyond Earth's orbit and was the first privately funded landing on the Moon. Though the spacecraft crashed, Israel became the seventh country to make lunar orbit and the fourth country, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and China to attempt a soft landing on the Moon. Two days after the failed attempt to soft land on the Moon, SpaceIL announced plans for a second attempt, Beresheet 2. This mission has been suspended in 2025 due to lack of funding. The SpaceIL team was founded as a nonprofit organization wishing to promote scientific and technological education in Israel. Its total budget for the mission was estimated at US$100 million, mostly donated by Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn, Sheldon Edelson and other philanthropists, as well as the Israel Space Agency (ISA).

History SpaceIL began as a competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP), which offered US$30 million in prizes to inspire teams to develop low-cost methods of robotic lunar exploration. The SpaceIL entry was unique among GLXP contenders, in that instead of building a tracked or wheeled rover, SpaceIL planned to meet the requirement to travel 500 meters (1,600 ft) on the lunar surface by having the lander "hop" using rocket engine propulsion from its landing site to another site more than 500 meters away. By June 2017, the lander spacecraft was undergoing integration and testing, and in August 2017, Google Lunar XPrize announced an extension of the prize competition deadline to 31 March 2018, but the contest ended without a winner when no team launched before the deadline. Nevertheless, SpaceIL continued development and fabrication. By January 2019, testing was complete and the spacecraft was delivered to Cape Canaveral, Florida for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The mission was successfully launched on 22 February 2019. The CEO of SpaceIL was Ido Anteby, and the president remains Morris Kahn. On 11 April 2019, its main engine malfunctioned during descent, and the lander crashed on the Moon's surface. Though the mission failed, Israel was the seventh country to have a spacecraft orbit the Moon.

Founders and supporters The cofounders of the team were Yariv Bash, former electronics and computer engineer in the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, and Flytrex CEO; Kfir Damari, a Computer Networking lecturer and entrepreneur; and Yonatan Winetraub, formerly a satellite systems engineer at Israel Aerospace Industries and a biophysics PhD candidate at Stanford University. Morris Kahn was the chairman of the public board. The CEO of SpaceIL was Ido Anteby since 2018. The team has technical support from the Israel Space Agency (ISA), Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael Systems and Elbit Systems. SpaceIL was also supported by educational institutions, including the Technion, Tel Aviv University, Weizmann Institute of Science and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. . The founders of the team stated that if they had won the competition, the money would have been donated to educational purposes. After building the Beresheet lunar lander, its prime contractor Israel Aerospace Industries was contemplating the possibility of building commercial landers.

Beresheet

Beresheet was a demonstrator of a small robotic lunar lander. Its aims included promoting careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); and landing its magnetometer and laser retroreflector on the Moon. The lander was previously known as Sparrow, and was officially named Beresheet (Hebrew: בְּרֵאשִׁית, "Genesis") in December 2018. Its net mass was 150 kg (330 lb); when fueled at launch its mass was 585 kg (1,290 lb). Size-wise, it had been compared to a washing machine. It used seven ground stations, globally, for Earth-lander communication. Its Mission Control room is at Israel Aerospace Industries in Yehud, Israel.

Payload The spacecraft carried a "time capsule" created by the Arch Mission Foundation, containing over 30 million pages of analog and digital data, including a full copy of the English-language Wikipedia, the Wearable Rosetta disc, the PanLex database, the Torah, children's drawings, a children's book inspired by the space launch, memoirs of a Holocaust survivor, Israel's national anthem (Hatikvah), the Israeli flag, and a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Its scientific payload included a magnetometer supplied by the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science to measure the local magnetic field, and a laser retroreflector array supplied by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to enable precise measurements of the Earth–Moon distance.

Propulsion The spacecraft featured one main LEROS 2b and 8 DST-12 small liquid-propellant, restartable rocket engine, using monomethylhydrazine (MMH) fuel and mixed oxides of nitrogen (MON) as oxidizer. This single engine was used to reach lunar orbit, as well as for deceleration and propulsive landing.The DST12 engines were mainly used for flight control maneuvers

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with SpaceIL

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what SpaceIL claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to SpaceIL before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about SpaceIL ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of SpaceIL

In research: SpaceIL appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses SpaceIL in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: SpaceIL is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2011 establishments in Israel, Companies based in Tel Aviv, Exploration of the Moon, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for SpaceIL outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study SpaceIL in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what SpaceIL means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain SpaceIL out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is SpaceIL in simple terms?

Why does SpaceIL matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study SpaceIL?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on SpaceIL.