Israel and Germany join forces to travel to the moon together
The two most important companies in the space sectors of Israel and Germany have just confirmed their alliance to add their technological capabilities and build a spacecraft that will travel to the Moon and land on its surface in 2022.
The newly re-elected Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has placed his trust in the leading Israeli aerospace company, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), and Chancellor Angela Merkel in the entirely German company OHB in Bremen, to represent their respective countries in what should be the first joint step of both countries on the Moon.
This has been ratified by the director of future scientific and exploration projects of OHB, Lutz Richter, in the European Lunar Symposium that was to be held last week in Padova, Italy, though it has taken place virtually because of the coronavirus, yet with connections of scientists and industrialists from Europe and all countries of the world.
The German-Israeli pact establishes that the main contractor and maximum responsible for the joint project of the lunar mission is OHB, which will manage all the scientific equipment that will travel in the space probe, whose name has not yet been revealed.
The industrial component that remains in the hands of IAI is the redesign of the avionics, the flight software and the construction of the descent module that must land on our natural satellite.
Both companies are seeking the support of private companies or space organizations to help finance the more than $100 million outlay involved in the initiative.
The European Space Agency (ESA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) are seen as possible alternatives. Between the two entities and some other contribution, a maximum of 25 kilos of geophysical and seismological equipment could be placed on board the German-Israeli probe, as well as some experiment related to regolith - the mineral mantle that covers the Moon - to deposit it in the ground by means of a robotic arm.
The confirmation that the project is going ahead has caused surprise in the international space sector, since the German-Israeli spacecraft is an improved variant of the unfortunate Israeli Beresheet probe. It was a project of the IAI and the non-profit organization SpaceIL that was launched into space on February 22nd from Cape Canaveral inside an American Falcon 9 rocket.
Beresheet - which means 'genesis' in the Hebrew language - reached the moon's orbit on April 4th, making Israel the seventh nation to succeed in placing a space device around the moon. But on April 11th, when it was in the middle of its descent to the Moon, it suffered a sequence of failures that caused its destruction when it hit the lunar surface at high speed.
Weighing 585 kilos, 1.53 metres high and with a diameter of 2.28 metres, Beresheet was carrying miniature laser-engraved holy books and plaques with the Israeli flag. It also contained several cameras, a magnetometer and a laser retroreflector, which had to operate for 5 days, the period of a battery powered by small solar panels.
The accident prevented Israel from becoming the fourth world power to be able to set up an artifact on the only natural satellite on Earth. However, on January 20, work began on making the Beresheet 2 probe a reality.
OHB is not the only company using an advanced version of the Beresheet descent module. In mid-2019, the American company Firefly Aerospace also agreed to use the technology of the Israeli lunar probe for Genesis, its own lunar lander.
