Darnit, apparently Beresheet's main engine failed at the last minute. But, on the bright side, the first photos of black holes were released, and were exactly as Einstein's theories had predicted.
Beresheet fails to land on the moonLast-minute engine failure appears to cause Beresheet to crash. Netanyahu:
We will try again.The Beresheet spacecraft failed to land on the moon Thursday evening after its main engine failed.
The landing process started at 10:05 PM Israeli time. The craft was supposed to touch down on the lunar surface approximately 20 minutes later, but appears to have crashed.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara and his son Yair arrived at the control room in Yehud to watch the landing live. "Today we have unlimited pride and joy. The Israeli spacecraft is about to reach the moon and hope it will be successful," Netanyahu said.
"It is already possible to say that this is another important step for humanity and a giant step for the State of Israel, and Israel is the fourth country in history after three world powers to make this arrival," added the prime minister.
Following the engine failure, Netanyahu said that the launch and successful orbit were still a tremendous achievement for Israel.
"If at first you don't succeed, you try again," the prime minister said, adding that Israel would have a spacecraft land successfully on the moon within the next two to three years.
The spacecraft was launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on February 22 and has traveled four million miles in its journey to the moon.
Israeli NGO SpaceIL and state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the two main partners in the project, describe Beresheet as the "world's first spacecraft built in a non-governmental mission," with philanthropist Morris Kahn providing $40 million of the $100 million budget.
Israel sought to become the fourth country to put a spacecraft on the lunar surface, following the United States, Russia, and China, but will have to settle for being the seventh to achieve orbit around the moon instead.
Beresheet carried a scientific instrument to measure the lunar magnetic field, which will help scientists to understand how the moon formed. The data collected by the spacecraft was to be shared with NASA.
The spacecraft also carried a "time capsule" containing digital files including a Bible, children's drawings, Israeli songs, the memoirs of a Holocaust survivor, and a blue-and-white Israeli flag.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin shared his excitement prior to the landing attempt.
"Dozens of kids who are passionate about science and space, from all over the country, have come to Beit HaNasi to see the landing of the spaceship on the moon tonight. Good luck 'Beresheet'!" Rivlin said.
Following the malfunction, Rivlin said that "there is no need to be disappointed. We need to praise what we accomplished.”
"This is an important night for the State of Israel," he said.
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https://www.space.com/black-hole-event-horizon-images-einstein.htmlHistoric First Images of a Black Hole Show Einstein Was Right (Again)
Albert Einstein's towering genius is on display yet again.
The first-ever images of a black hole, which the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project unveiled today (April 10), further bolster Einstein's century-old theory of general relativity, researchers said.
"Today, general relativity has passed another crucial test, this one spanning from horizons to the stars," EHT team member Avery Broderick, of the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, said during a news conference today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Related: What Exactly Is a Black Hole Event Horizon (and What Happens There)?
General relativity describes gravity as a consequence of the warping of space-time. Massive objects create a sort of dent or well in the cosmic fabric, which passing bodies fall into because they're following curved contours (not as a result of some mysterious force at a distance, which had been the prevailing view before Einstein came along).
This image by the Event Horizon Telescope project shows the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the M87 galaxy.This image by the Event Horizon Telescope project shows the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the M87 galaxy.
Albert Einstein's towering genius is on display yet again.
The first-ever images of a black hole, which the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project unveiled today (April 10), further bolster Einstein's century-old theory of general relativity, researchers said.
"Today, general relativity has passed another crucial test, this one spanning from horizons to the stars," EHT team member Avery Broderick, of the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, said during a news conference today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Related: What Exactly Is a Black Hole Event Horizon (and What Happens There)?
General relativity describes gravity as a consequence of the warping of space-time. Massive objects create a sort of dent or well in the cosmic fabric, which passing bodies fall into because they're following curved contours (not as a result of some mysterious force at a distance, which had been the prevailing view before Einstein came along).
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General relativity makes specific predictions about how this warping works. For example, the theory posits that black holes exist, and that each of these gravitational monsters has an event horizon — a point of no return beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. Further, the event horizon should be roughly circular and of a predictable size, which depends on the black hole's mass.
And that's just what we see in the newly unveiled EHT images, which show the silhouette of the supermassive black hole at the heart of M87, a giant elliptical galaxy that lies 55 million light-years from Earth.
"The shadow exists, is nearly circular and the inferred mass matches estimates due to the dynamics of stars 100,000 times farther away," Broderick said.
That mass, by the way, is 6.5 billion times that of Earth's sun. That's huge even by supermassive-black-hole standards; for comparison, the behemoth at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy weighs in at a mere 4.3 million solar masses.
As Broderick noted, this is not the first test that general relativity has passed; the theory has survived many challenges over the past 100 years.
For example, general relativity predicts that massive, accelerating objects generate ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. In 2015, gravitational waves were confirmed directly by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), which detected the ripples created by a merger between two black holes. (These black holes weren't the supermassive type; combined, they contained just a few dozen solar masses.)
So, it's not exactly a surprise that Einstein was right about event horizons as well. But confirming that general relativity holds in a hitherto unstudied realm has great value, EHT team members said.
EHT's work "has verified Einstein's theories of gravity in this most extreme laboratory," EHT director Sheperd Doeleman, of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said during today's press conference.
Topic: Space News - Beresheet fails, Einstein triumphs (Read 857 times)