An artist's impression of the Beresheet lander on the surface of the Moon SpaceIL

At 19:05 GMT (20:05 BST) today, Israel's Beresheet lander is scheduled to touch down on the Moon. The landing will be broadcast live on YouTube, with the broadcast starting at 18:45 GMT (19:45 BST). Updates will also be posted on SpaceIL’s Twitter account.

You can watch the live stream below.


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Beresheet, which is about the size of a washing machine, has been orbiting the Moon since April 4 after leaving Earth on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in February. And when it lands, it’ll make history. If successful, it will become the first privately funded probe sent to the Moon.

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It’s a big year for space exploration. Fifty years ago, humans set foot on the Moon for the first time. Since then, only the US, Russia and China have landed spacecraft on our satellite, but that is about to change.

Built by Israel Aerospace Industries, and developed by the non-profit company SpaceIL, Beresheet’s mission marks a significant change in the way ambitious space missions are funded. Companies like SpaceX have made launching into space a business model, but SpaceIL is taking that one step further, by landing on the Moon.


Once the four-legged spacecraft lands on the lunar surface, it will survive for a few days before it is burnt out by the sun’s glare. Its aim is to study the Moon’s iron core,

This mission was an entry to Google’s Lunar X Prize, held in 2007 and 2008. The mission, for a privately funded team to send a spacecraft to the Moon and send video back to Earth, had an initial deadline of 2014, but dates kept being pushed back. Although five teams were part of the competition by 2018, it was announced last year that nobody was able to meet the deadline they had put in place of March 2018. Nobody won the prize money.

Although they did not win the $20 million prize, SpaceIL continued developing its lunar mission. The whole mission has cost $100m, which is low for a lunar landing mission.

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On Tuesday, April 9, Beresheet fired its engines for just over a minute, to bring it into a closer orbit of the Moon in preparation for the landing.


Beresheet will use its engines to bring it to a stable position 5 metres above the surface of the Moon. The engines will then be turned off, and the spacecraft will fall to the surface with the Moon’s gravity – which is about one sixth of the gravity on Earth.



The spacecraft has four landing legs, each of which is made up of three struts that turn it into a kind of tripod, with a pad at the end that will be in contact with the Moon’s surface. Built into the spacecraft are energy absorption mechanisms, to help the spacecraft have a soft landing.

One piece of energy absorption technology has been used in previous spacecrafts – honeycomb structures made of aluminium that will be crushed upon landing. Another bit of technology is brand new, however, so will be tested for the first time – stainless steel elements that are expected to compress and absorb energy.

The legs will be placed far enough apart so the lander does not topple over when it lands. Afterwards, the landing gear will be retracted into the spacecraft.

The probe’s landing site, Mare Serenitatis, is in the northern hemisphere of the Moon, close to the landing sites of Apollo 15 and 17, and Lunar 2 and 21. If Beresheet takes photographs on its way down, there’s a chance it will get a glimpse of some of these sites, similar to Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which took photos of Apolli 12, 14 and 17 on its way down.

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The chosen landing site has few craters, which means the landing should go smoothly. The crust of Mare Serenitatis is magnetic, which makes it a perfect spot for studying the Moon’s iron core and its magnetism.

Beresheet has cameras to capture photographs and a magnetometer to measure the magnetic field on the surface of the Moon, at that site.

“Beresheet is going to land on Mare Serenitatis, a dark basaltic plain formed by ancient volcanic eruptions” says Hani Mohammadi, an aerospace expert.

The first hint the Moon ever had a magnetic field was given when astronauts first brought back samples of rock from the Moon and found some were magnetic. Until then, we had no idea the Moon had ever had a magnetic field.

On Earth, our magnetic field is caused by the motion of liquid iron in our outer core, created by the convection of heat. This motion creates a dynamo, which is responsible for the magnetic field.

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The Moon, however, is not big enough for convection to take place in its core, so how liquid iron could be moving around in its core was a mystery. Now, we expect the Moon’s middle layer, called the mantle, is responsible for stirring up its liquid iron core. The core and the mantle rotate around slightly different axes, and the friction at the boundary causes the movement of the iron.

The Moon’s magnetic field is thought to have lasted for about a billion years, somewhere between around 2.7 billion and 4.2 billion years ago.

“Lunar magnetism has been an enigma for decades,” said Oded Aharonson, researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and lead scientist on the mission. “It is a privilege to be part of this mission that’s taking one more step towards solving it.”

“Beside scientific research, it is the first ever private lunar mission and it is exactly what we need in space exploration, privatisation” says Mohammandi. “The success of Beresheet is encouraging for private investors to invest in future space projects.”

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