News brief

As of Thursday, 28 March, Beresheet is making its final orbit around the Earth. On 30 March, it will hit perigee, buzz past its home planet one last time, and head towards the Moon, roughly 405,000 kilometers distant. SpaceIL senior engineer Yoav Landsman said the spacecraft will make a small trajectory correction on 1 April. The duration of the lunar insertion burn on 4 April, as well as the parameters of the initial lunar orbit, have yet to be decided, but SpaceIL was originally planning for an orbit roughly 10,000 by 300 kilometers. Landing won't happen for another week, on 11 April.

Now that Beresheet is so far from home, it has started making use of its partnership with NASA to use the Deep Space Network for communications. Earlier this week, it successfully chatted with flight controllers via the DSN at a rate of 1.0 kilobits per second: