Posted on 02/22/2019 7:59:14 AM PST by BenLurkin
The robotic lander, called Beresheet, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket yesterday evening (Feb. 21) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. If everything goes according to plan, Beresheet will zip around Earth for about six weeks in ever-widening orbits before heading toward its final destination. The craft will arrive in lunar orbit in early April and attempt a landing on the 11th of that month.
Beresheet's lengthy stay in Earth orbit may seem surprising. After all, China's Chang'e 4 farside lander reached lunar orbit just 4.5 days after its Dec. 7 liftoff (though Chang'e 4 didn't actually touch down until Jan. 2).
But the 5-foot-tall (1.5 meters) Beresheet cannot take a direct path to the moon, project team members said, because the lander shared a rocket ride with two other payloads. Also aboard the Falcon 9 last night were an Indonesian communications satellite and an experimental U.S. Air Force craft, both of which are making Earth orbit their home.
And you can't just jet straight off to the moon from Earth orbit, Winetraub said; the two celestial bodies must be lined up properly before Beresheet,,, can make its move.
"The moon is coming around, and we're doing our own orbit, and we need to synchronize everything," Winetraub said. "For that, we need to do something that's called 'phasing loops,' to make sure that the moon comes around in the right position so you can capture with it. And that takes time."
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Why It’ll Take Israel’s Lunar Lander 8 Weeks to Get to the Moon......................It’s flying ‘Standby’?................
Does it stop traveling on the Sabbath?
Originally an X-Prize contestant for a survey hopper.
But the 5-foot-tall (1.5 meters) Beresheet cannot take a direct path to the moon, project team members said, because the lander shared a rocket ride with two other payloads.
...
Yep. It can’t carry much propellant so it has to use what it has very efficiently.
8 weeks? Much better than 40 years.
Has to fight off some Gaza fire balloons on the way.
But the 5-foot-tall (1.5 meters) Beresheet cannot take a direct path to the moon, project team members said, because the lander shared a rocket ride with two other payloads. Also aboard the Falcon 9 last night were an Indonesian communications satellite and an experimental U.S. Air Force craft, both of which are making Earth orbit their home.
Another article I read about this said the craft carries a copy of the Torah. Odd the space.com article doesn’t mention that.
Anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program knows that lengthening your orbit by small increments every periapsis is the most fuel efficient way to get a lunar intercept orbit. Since Kerbals don’t need food, water, or oxygen, I leave them up their for weeks sometimes doing these kind of maneuvers to save fuel.
“8 weeks? Much better than 40 years.”
Apparently the purpose of the lander is to search for good intergalactic chinese food.
There was a GEOSAT that failed to make orbit - a Hughes bird IIRC.
The used a lunar slingshot to get it to GEO with min fule burn..
The satellite, Asiasat 3, was launched last Christmas Day from Kazakhstan to provide television and telephone service in Asia. But the Russian-built Proton launching rocket malfunctioned, leaving the satellite in an orbit too low and too tilted relative to the equator to be useful. As is common in such cases, the satellite was declared a total loss and its owner, Asia Satellite Telecommunications Company Ltd. of Hong Kong, received a $200 million payment from a consortium of 27 insurance companies.
But engineers at Hughes, which built the satellite, said today that the gravity of the Moon could be used to put the satellite into an orbit around Earth where it could be used, though not for its original purpose.
Source - https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/30/us/trying-to-save-satellite-company-is-sending-it-to-moon.html
It has to stop to get circumcised on day 8
Among the capsule’s contents is the “Lunar Library,” a collection of materials that includes the full English-language version of Wikipedia.
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Better to have the Free Republic database.
Ha! After the bar closes, maybe
It keeps forgetting stuff and has to keep turning back.
The problem is not ‘getting there’.
The problem is getting back....................
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