Israeli robotic lunar lander

[bknight]

Landing attempt today at 1500-1600 EDT today.  Link to the live broadcast.

https://www.space.com/israel-moon-landing-beresheet-webcast.html?utm_source=sdc-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20190411-sdc

[Zakalwe]

Crashed, unfortunately.
The descent engine failed some 10 klicks up

[bknight]

Crashed, unfortunately.
The descent engine failed some 10 klicks up

I was just coming on to post that, but you beat me to the punch.
Too bad for them, it would have been nice to have another lander for a short time.

[Apollo 957]

They grabbed (at least) a couple of good photos from orbit and descent before they lost comms, though.

[onebigmonkey]

Shame it failed when it did as it was about to fly over the Apollo 11 site!

I watched the live feed of this and it was getting obvious to me that it wasn't going as planned - it still had an awful lot of velocity to shave off with not far to go!

I await the inevitable "Aliens did it" competing with "if we can't do it now with our modern technology home come..." amongst youtube's most learned.

[bknight]

Shame it failed when it did as it was about to fly over the Apollo 11 site!

I watched the live feed of this and it was getting obvious to me that it wasn't going as planned - it still had an awful lot of velocity to shave off with not far to go!

I await the inevitable "Aliens did it" competing with "if we can't do it now with our modern technology home come..." amongst youtube's most learned.

Yes probably Mr. Strange or taffy 

[ka9q]

I just hope they get the chance to try again. It would be a shame to waste all that engineering work and experience on just one failed mission.

[bknight]

I just hope they get the chance to try again. It would be a shame to waste all that engineering work and experience on just one failed mission.

They are going to try again

Israel may not have succeeded in a soft landing on the moon, but the tiny country is not giving up on its lunar ambitions just yet. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who watched the landing attempt from the mission control room, said Israel will try to land on the moon again in the next two to three years.

https://www.space.com/beresheet-moon-crash-engine-glitch.html

[ka9q]

Sounds somewhat like the Surveyor 4 failure, when contact was lost just a few minutes before landing. I don't think the cause was definitively found, but the explosion of the solid fuel retrorocket seemed the most likely cause.