The Israeli spacecraft has another glitch that hit its mission immediately after the previous problem of facing difficulty in tracking using its sensitive star tracker navigation system. The lunar lander Beresheet has one more problem added to the existing one that is the engineers in Israel working at space organization, SpaceIL, have found that the onboard computer has rebooted itself without any notice.
The lander had been set out from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the earlier week. Immediately, after landing the 1,290-pound lander had sent it’s the first-ever signal back to Earth during its first round of in-orbit tests. The computers on board had been programmed to help manage the 3 Minute engine fire which can probably help give the lander a flight quite far away from the Earth during its entire weeks of a long trip to the Moon. However, everything was down the drain as something unexpected happened that is a surprising action of a reboot. After the reboot, the rover’s computer performed an independent reset due to which the maneuver had to be called off.
The Israeli lunar lander has been programmed to fly in an intensifying elliptical spiral motion around the Earth followed by slowly and steadily slipping into the Moon’s orbit using its gravitational pull. April will be the time when the lander will be landing for the first time on the Moon. The rebooting of the computer means that the spacecraft has not moved far away from the Earth. It is not yet clear of how much this glitch is going to cause the team or how long will it take to land on the Moon. There will be delays in the orbital maneuver plans but it will be definitely seen to land the rover as scheduled. The engineers hope to get to the root of the cause. If everything goes well then it will be the first Israeli lunar lander to land on Moon.
