An Israeli spacecraft has failed in its bid to become the first private craft to land on the moon after crashing on the lunar surface.

Non-profit organisation SpaceIL had been hoping to see its Beresheet craft complete a landing on the moon, and in the process make Israel only the fourth country to manage the feat.

But Doron Opher, general manager of the space division of Israel Aerospace Industries, said the craft “definitely crashed on the surface of the moon”.

The spacecraft lost communication with Earth just moments before it was to touch down.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try try again,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was on hand for what organisers had hoped to be a celebration.

The lander – whose name is Hebrew for Genesis – took off almost two months ago from Cape Canaveral in Florida as part of a “ride share” with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as the Beresheet mission could not afford its own rocket.

The four-legged spacecraft, which is around the size of a washing machine, had been circling the Earth in increasingly large orbits waiting to be captured by the moon’s gravity.

It was expected to land in the Sea of Serenity, on the northern hemisphere of the moon’s near side.

A time capsule was on board the lander — which included a picture of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died on the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 — as well as a lunar library containing 30 million pages on a disk from the US-based Arch Mission Foundation.

Mr Ramon’s widow, Rona, who was a big supporter of Beresheet, died of cancer in December. </s> The Israeli Beresheet lander module which crashed into the Moon’s surface in April might have impacted the Earth’s natural satellite in more ways than one, possibly seeding the lunar surface with terrestrial lifeforms, Wired reports.

As the media outlet points out, the lander was carrying a number of objects belonging to a non-profit group called Arch Mission Foundation whose goal is to create “a backup of planet Earth”, with the cargo including the organisation’s “first lunar library, a DVD-sized archive containing 30 million pages of information, human DNA samples, and thousands of tardigrade” – micro-animals also known as water bears that can survive even in space.

"Ironically, our payload may be the only surviving thing from that mission," said Nova Spivack, founder of the Arch Mission Foundation.

He noted that as tardigrades are capable of falling into dormant states, with their bodies becoming dehydrated, these creatures can potentially be revived in the future, though it remains unclear whether any of the water bears that were part of the Beresheet’s cargo could be recovered and revived.

The lander, which aimed to be the first spacecraft made with mostly private funding to touch down on the surface of the Moon, was the creation of the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL working in partnership with Israel Aerospace Industries and was launched on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in February, only to crash into the lunar surface on 11 April. </s> There had been much excitement leading up to the landing attempt, with the agency tweeting regular updates. However, its latest message said: "#Beresheet's main engine fail! Spacecraft failed landing. Appeared to have crashed on the moon's surface!" Beresheet marks the first time the Israelis have attempted to land a craft on the surface of the Moon.

The spacecraft crashed onto the moon on Thursday after a series of technical failures during its final descent, shattering hopes of a historic controlled landing on the lunar surface. The unmanned robotic lander suffered periodic engine and communications failures during the 21 minutes or so of the landing sequence, the support team said. The final manoeuvre on Wednesday brought it into a tight elliptical orbit around the moon, 15-17 km (9-10.5 miles) from the surface at its closest. From there it was a short, nail-biting and ultimately disappointing conclusion. Team SpaceIL, tweeting via the #IsraelToTheMoon hashtag, said: "Don’t stop believing! We came close but unfortunately didn’t succeed with the landing process. More updates to follow."

After eight years of development, Beresheet - which means Genesis in Hebrew - was launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on Friday, January 22 on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket Falcon 9. Had the mission been successful, the 160-kilogram unmanned four-legged spacecraft would have been the smallest and cheapest spacecraft ever to land on the moon, with Israel becoming only the fourth nation to do so, after the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Its Mission Control room was at Israel Aerospace Industries in Yehud, Israel. Scientists had hoped to land its magnetometer, digital time capsule, and laser retroreflector on the Moon - as well as a bible.

A time capsule was also on board the lander - which included a picture of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died on the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 - as well as a lunar library containing 30 million pages on a disk from the US-based Arch Mission Foundation. Mr Ramon's widow, Rona, who was a big supporter of Beresheet, died of cancer in December. Funding came in the form of $100m in private donations – a fraction of the billions of dollars it has previously cost to get there. Israeli organisation SpaceIL is behind the lunar lander, and it has taken seven weeks to get from Earth to the Moon. </s> The Israeli spacecraft launched by SpaceX in February was set to make history Thursday after a two-month journey to the moon, but after a few intense minutes, SpaceIL confirmed the spacecraft did not survive the lunar landing.

SpaceIL's lander, called Beresheet, was expected to touch down on the lunar surface after 3:20 p.m. EST, but shortly after the spacecraft began the descent mission control lost telemetry with the spacecraft, and then there was a problem with the main engine and finally communication was lost.

If the landing had been achieved, Israel would have become the fourth country to ever land a spacecraft on the moon. That small club includes the U.S., Russia and China.

NASA's Deep Space Network allowed SpaceIL and the Israel Space Agency to communicate with Bersheet during the journey to the moon.

A NASA navigation device on Beresheet provided lunar surface location details that can be used by future landers for navigation.

To prepare for landing, the spacecraft’s engines fired, as it needed to slow from more than 3,730 mph to a full stop to touch down on the moon’s surface.

At 22 kilometers above the surface Beresheet sent back a selfie showing moon craters below and the Israeli flag with the phrase "small country, big dreams."

Those dreams were not fully realized this time. When Beresheet was about 5 meters from the landing site the spacecraft would have shut off all engines before free-falling for a moment to complete the landing. It was around this time that communication was lost with the spacecraft.

"Space is hard, but worth the risks. If we succeeded every time, there would be no reward. It’s when we keep trying that we inspire others and achieve greatness," Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, tweeted after the landing attempt. "Thank you for inspiring us @TeamSpaceIL. We’re looking forward to future opportunities to explore the Moon together."

SpaceIL's lander would have touched down within the Mare Serenitatis on the northern hemisphere of the moon. The location was chosen because of the site’s magnetic anomalies.

The private moon mission was one of several international contenders for a $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE if they had landed on the moon by 2017. However, none of the commercial companies successfully completed that by the competition deadline.

XPRIZE officials attended the landing attempt at mission control and said the nonprofit will still receive $1 million to help them to continue their work and pursue another mission. </s> A tiny robotic lander from Israel attempted to touch down on the Moon this afternoon, but it ultimately failed to stick the landing during its final descent to the surface. As it was firing its main engine to land on the ground, some kind of failure occurred, causing the engine to shut down. The mission team got the engine back online, but it could not regain communication with the spacecraft, suggesting the lander crashed into the surface.

“We had a failure in the spacecraft,” Opher Doron, head of Israel Aerospace Industry’s space division, said during a live stream of the landing. “We unfortunately have not managed to land successfully. We are the seventh country to orbit the Moon, and the fourth to reach the Moon’s surface. It’s a tremendous achievement up until now.”

“Well, we didn’t make it, but we definitely tried.”

The vehicle that attempted the landing was called Beresheet, and it was the product of an Israeli group called SpaceIL. The organization had originally started developing the lander as part of the now-dead Google Lunar X Prize competition, a contest to send the first private vehicle to the Moon. The competition ultimately ended without a winner when none of the teams launched before the final deadline of March 31st, 2018. But SpaceIL pushed on with its mission, and it was able to launch Beresheet on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket this year.

Up until now, the mission had been proceeding smoothly. The Falcon 9 rocket deployed Beresheet into a wide orbit around Earth on February 21st, and the lander spent the last two months traveling out to the distance of the Moon. Then, last week, Beresheet entered lunar orbit in preparation for today’s event. At around 3:10PM ET today, Beresheet reoriented itself and fired its main engine to start the landing process.

“We’ve passed the point of no return.”

“We’ve passed the point of no return; we’re in the landing process,” Doron said when the landing began. The firing slowed the vehicle down and took it out of orbit. All seemed fine at first. As it descended to the surface, Beresheet even sent a picture of the sequence back to Earth — a selfie with Israel’s flag. It also sent back one final picture of the lunar surface before things turned south.

The engine firing was supposed to decrease the lander’s speed from 3,700 miles per hour (6,000 kilometers per hour) to zero. But when the spacecraft was about 4 miles (7 kilometers) from the surface, Beresheet’s engine inexplicably stopped firing. The mission team was able to reset the engine, but they lost communication with the spacecraft. The likeliest scenario is that the spacecraft came in too fast and created a new crater on the surface of the Moon.

If the landing had been successful, SpaceIL would have been the first to land a privately funded lander on the Moon’s surface. Up until now, only three countries have ever landed on the Moon — the US, Russia, and China — and all of those vehicles were overseen and funded by governments. SpaceIL claims that it took $90 million to develop Beresheet, and only about $2 million of that budget came from the Israeli government. The rest of the project was mostly funded by two big investors: a South Africa-born Israeli entrepreneur named Morris Kahn and the Adelson Family Foundation, a charity based in Los Angeles that supports Israel.

But now, the title of “first private lunar lander” is still unclaimed, though SpaceIL says it is proud of how far it got. “Well, we didn’t make it, but we definitely tried,” Kahn said during the live stream. “And I think that the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous. I think we can be proud.”

“If at first you don’t succeed, you try again.”

However, SpaceIL already insinuated that it might try to do another lunar landing in the future. “If at first you don’t succeed, you try again,” Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, said during the live stream. “We will try again,” he then said in Hebrew.

SpaceIL was also set to receive a bonus $1 million prize from the X Prize Foundation if it had successfully stuck the landing. However, heads of the foundation said they will still give the money to the nonprofit. “They managed to touch the surface of the Moon, and that’s what we were looking for in our ‘Moonshot’ award,” Anousheh Ansari, the CEO of the X Prize Foundation, said in a tweeted video.

Though today’s landing wasn’t a success, there are still more private groups aiming to touch down on the Moon in the years ahead, many of which competed in the original Google Lunar X Prize competition. One startup, Astrobotic, hopes to set up a lunar delivery service, by transporting payloads to the Moon’s surface. The company has already booked a launch for its first mission and it hopes to fly in early 2021. Japanese company ispace is also planning to send vehicles to the Moon in 2020 and 2021. The startup’s ultimate goal is to mine the Moon for resources and set up a thriving settlement on the lunar surface.

“Many of these teams continue to develop their technologies,” Ansari tells The Verge. “It’s not just about winning the prize. Maybe they started to win the prize but they continue for a lot more.” </s> This is the first private spacecraft to ever attempt a moon landing.

Earlier today, Israel’s intrepid Beresheet spacecraft attempted to touch down on the surface of the moon. While the endeavor was regrettably not a successful one, the mission broke substantial ground in its goal to land the world’s first private spacecraft on lunar terrain.

Named after the Hebrew word for Genesis, the Beresheet aimed to become the first-ever privately developed craft to plant its landing legs on lunar soil. The unmanned vehicle was supposed to make a soft landing on the near side of the moon – the side that always faces Earth – at 3:25 p.m. ET. However, “a failure in the spacecraft” prevented the mission from reaching its goal, leaving Israel unable to safely land the craft on the moon’s surface, The Jerusalem Post is reporting.

“The State of Israel fell just short of becoming only the fourth member of a prestigious club of nations to complete the formidable task of landing a spacecraft on the lunar surface,” after the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China, notes the media outlet.

After what looked like a flawless first phase of deceleration ahead of approaching the moon, the mission’s team lost contact with the probe minutes before what would have been a historic landing. Following a series of technical problems, the craft eventually went silent, ceasing all communication with mission control in Yehud, Israel, and is presumed to have crash-landed on the lunar surface.

“If at first you don’t succeed, you try and try again – and we’ll try again,” said the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who watched the landing attempt from mission control.

Developed by the nonprofit organization SpaceIL in partnership with the government-owned aerospace company Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the Beresheet was originally built as a contender for Google’s now-defunct Lunar Xprize – an initiative that challenged private companies to try to land an unmanned craft on the moon.

At nearly five feet high, 6.5 feet wide, and weighing a little over 1,300 pounds, the Beresheet boasts the title of the smallest probe to ever aim for the moon. No bigger than a washing machine, the Israeli spacecraft took to the skies on February 21 as part of a SpaceX rideshare and successfully entered lunar orbit on April 4.

In preparation for landing day, the Beresheet had spent the last six weeks flying around planet Earth in a spiraling series of ever-widening orbits in order to raise itself toward the moon and get into the optimal position to slide into lunar orbit, notes Space. After an epic two-month journey of more than 4 million miles around the Earth, the Israeli lunar probe finally geared up for its highly anticipated touchdown on April 11.

The spacecraft had set its sights on a landing site located within a vast, ancient lava plain called Mare Serenitatis (“Sea of Serenity”), about 30 degrees north of the lunar equator. As Forbes points out, the Beresheet targeted a touchdown location found roughly halfway between the landing sites of NASA’s Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 missions.

The Israeli lunar probe began the landing process at 3:12 p.m. ET in what appeared to be very auspicious circumstances.

“The spacecraft is doing exactly what’s supposed to do right now,” Opher Doron, general manager of IAI’s space division, said at mission control two minutes later, as the Beresheet ignited its 100-pound-thrust main engine to commence the breaking process.

As Ars Technica remarked, the spacecraft fired its thrusters to reduce its velocity from about 3.7 mph (with respect to the moon) to zero. As it began its descent toward the lunar ground, the Beresheet snapped a selfie from a distance of 13.6 miles of the moon’s surface.

After an initial period of smooth sailing, the Israeli craft ran into a small snag that caused the mission’s team to lose telemetry for a few moments. At around 3:23 p.m. ET, the Beresheet suffered a problem with its main engine when the craft was about 1.2 miles away from the lunar surface and eventually lost communication with SpaceIL’s control center in Yehud.

“According to initial assessments, one of the spacecraft’s inertial measurement units (IMUs) failed during the final effort. A full investigation will now begin,” details The Jerusalem Post.

“We had a failure of the spacecraft. We unfortunately have not been able to land successfully,” Doron said during the live broadcast streamed by SpaceIL on its YouTube channel and Facebook page.

“Where we got to was very tremendous and we can be very proud,” SpaceIL chairman Morris Kahn chimed in.

While the mission ended in failure, the company’s efforts were not in vain. Following today’s landing attempt, Peter Diamandis and Anousheh Ansari from the X Prize Foundation have announced that they will grant a $1 million Moonshot Award to SpaceIL to continue the mission.

According to Netanyahu, Israel is aiming to send out another lunar lander in 2021. </s> Yesterday, Israel’s first mission to the Moon ended in a rather abrupt and unsatisfying manner. SpaceIL’s Beresheet lunar lander, which was part of a privately-funded mission that would have made Israel the fourth country to successfully land on the Moon, faltered at the very last second.

In the immediate aftermath of the lander’s crash it as unclear exactly what went wrong. An issue with the spacecraft’s engine was suspected, but the lander’s signal was lost shortly after the engine came back online so answers were hard to come by. Now, after studying the data from the landing attempt, SpaceIL has a better idea of what went wrong.

“Preliminary technical information collected by the teams shows that the first technical issue occurred at 14 km above the Moon,” SpaceIL explained in a tweet. “At 150 meters when the connection with #Beresheet was lost, it was moving at 500 km/h, making a collision inevitable.”

“Our engineers think that a technical glitch in one of the components caused the main engine to shut down – making it impossible to slow the spacecraft’s descent. By the time the engine was restarted its velocity was too high to land properly.”

This is essentially what we assumed happened based on what viewers were able to see during the live stream of the landing attempt. The engine lost power and the spacecraft’s signal went dark just moments after it was fired back up.

It’s a massive disappointment for SpaceIL and anyone who was following Beresheet’s journey. Still, the mission was a success in a number of ways, not least of which is the fact that it successfully entered lunar orbit in the first place, which is no easy task.

In a related piece of awesome news, the XPrize group has decided to award a $1 million “Moonshot Award” to SpaceIL in order to help the team get started on whatever ventures they will be pursuing next. </s> When Israeli lunar lander Beresheet crash-landed onto the Moon in April, watched live by millions across the world, the spacecraft left a rather serious dent in the lunar surface.According to a report published Monday by American magazine Wired, however, Beresheet may have left more on the Moon than previously thought. The SpaceIL spacecraft was apparently carrying thousands of microscopic tardigrades,, joined the lunar-destined journey as part of an initiative led by the Arch Mission Foundation, founded by Nova Spivack.Aiming to maintain a backup of planet Earth around the Solar System,Based on the foundation's analysis of the spacecraft's trajectory and the composition of their lunar library, Spivack told Wired that he was quite confident that their payload mostly or entirely survived the impact.eaching the moon was a feat previously completed only by the United States, Russia (then the USSR) and China, backed by giant sums far exceeding Beresheet's modest NIS 350 million ($99m.) budget."For the first 24 hours, we were just in shock," Spivack said. "We sort of expected that it would be successful. We knew there were risks but we didn't think the risks were that significant."Known for their resilience,. Some 3,000 organisms joined a 12-day journey into space on-board the agency's Foton-M3 mission, and survived conditions that would kill humans in minutes.If the dehydrated tardigrades survived the landing, Spivack added, they could hypothetically be revived in years to come by future human astronauts upon their return to Earth. Research has previously shown that dehydrated micro-animals can be revived decades later.While SpaceIL and its lead donor, Morris Kahn, quickly stated their ambition following the Beresheet crash to launch a second spacecraft to the Moon within two years, the organization announced in June that reattempting the same mission would not present a sufficiently great challenge.If some lunar enthusiasts might have been disappointed by the announcement, SpaceIL co-founder Kfir Damari told The Jerusalem Post in July that the decision is about broadening their horizons even further."It's possible that we will return to the Moon, but we won't give a green light to the same project with the same design," Damari said."We decided that we want to look for different options -We're also thinking about other places, including the ability to go beyond the Moon."It remains to be seen whether SpaceIL's next mission will include taking even more tardigrades to the Moon, or perhaps even beyond. </s> On 11 April 2019, Israeli space company SpaceIL attempted to land the first privately-funded mission on to the Moon safely. While the mission failed in the final moments before it reached the surface, it seems the spacecraft might have tainted the moon's surface with tardigrades, or water bears, from Earth.

The Beresheet lander crashed on to the moon's surface, and may have become the first country to colonize an extraterrestrial body in the process… maybe.

Beresheet had a special package onboard — a "lunar library" put together by the Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit aiming to create "a backup of planet Earth." The library contained 30 million pages of human history, an optical disc with human DNA samples and thousands of dehydrated tardigrades — microscopic, vacuum-tolerant microbes.

These microscopic animals are called 'water bears' or 'moss piglets', and they're the most resistant lifeform known to humankind. Worldwide, there are more than 1,000 such species of tardigrades on the planet, the most recent member of which was found in a parking lot in Japan.

Tardigrades were added to SpaceIL's Beresheet mission at the very last minute, according to The Times of Israel. These incredibly hardy organisms are known to survive in a dehydrated state for years on end. The Earth is teeming with these creatures, which can survive even in the harshest climates — including the vacuum of space.

When it was time to land, the Beresheet spacecraft initiated its landing sequence successfully, but only a few kilometres above the surface, the main engine failed and the spacecraft couldn't brake in time to make the soft-landing it was planning to. Instead, it crashed into the surface, as seen in these mesmerising before-and-after shots of its landing site, captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

While many experts expected the mission to succeed, news of the spacecraft's crash landing raised an important question: did scientists just smeared the surface of the moon with the toughest known animal the universe?

Based on an analysis of the spacecraft's trajectory and the contents of the lunar library, founder of the Arch Mission Foundation, Nova Spivack, is rather confident that the library survived mostly or almost entirely intact, according to a Wired report.

Tardigrades can survive for anywhere between days and years, to be revived by a couple of doses of water (rehydration). In their dehydrated, dormant state, all the metabolic reactions in the cells of tardigrades are stopped. Molecules of water are replaced by protein, effectively turning these adorable microbes into an inanimate glass-like blob.

While tardigrades can survive water-free for 10 years, the lunar library is designed to last for millions. Only now are scientists started to gauge how these critters survive in the most unforgiving of environments — space, most of all. Learning about this could point to a means of rehydrating them after far longer periods of dormancy.

Find our entire collection of stories, in-depth analysis, live updates, videos & more on Chandrayaan 2 Moon Mission on our dedicated #Chandrayaan2TheMoon domain.
Israel's Beresheet lunar lander crashes at Mare Serenitatis on the surface of the Moon. The crash resulted from a failure in the lander's main engine, resulting in the total loss of the spacecraft.