Israel is set to become only the fourth nation to successfully land on the moon following a SpaceX rocket launch on Thursday night.

The robotic lander is the size of a washing machine and has been named "Beresheet", which is Hebrew for the biblical phrase "in the beginning".

It was one of three cargo loads carried by the Falcon 9 rocket, the most successful rocket used by billionaire Elon Musk's private aerospace company SpaceX.

In addition to the Israeli lunar lander, the Falcon 9 carried an Indonesian communications satellite, as well as an experimental satellite for the US Air Force.

Just as before, the Falcon 9 made a safe landing back on Earth, allowing SpaceX to recycle the rocket - landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.


Successful deployment of the SpaceIL lunar lander confirmed, starting the spacecraft’s two-month voyage to the Moon pic.twitter.com/iMlVYJHef3 — SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 22, 2019

The Beresheet robot will land on the near-side of the moon in mid-April after taking an unusual route to the lunar surface.

It will undergo a two-month journey covering roughly 4 million miles (6.5m km) as it orbits the Earth at a steadily increasing distance until it falls to the gravitational pull of the moon.

A series of precision manoeuvres will be performed before the lander's automated touchdown.

A successful "soft" touchdown would make Israel only the fourth state to ever land on the lunar surface, after the US, Russia, and China.

An unsuccessful "hard" landing would set it among a larger group that have intentionally crashed on the moon, including India, Japan, and the European Space Agency.

Image: Beresheet will be left like litter on the lunar surface

The spacecraft weighs 1,290 lbs (585kg) and was built by Israel's non-profit venture SpaceIL and the state-owned defence contractor Israel Aerospace Industries.

To land on the moon it received $100m, almost entirely funded by private donors.

Beresheet will spend just two to three days using the instruments on-board to photograph its landing site and measure the moon's magnetic field.

The data will be sent to SpaceIL's ground station Yehud via NASA's Deep Space Network.

At the end of the brief mission, the team at Yehud plan to simply shut down Beresheet, leaving the spacecraft littering the lunar landscape.