By Cheyenne Macdonald For Dailymail.com
Published: 23:58 BST, 15 May 2019 | Updated: 00:06 BST, 16 May 2019
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A month after Israeli non-profit SpaceIL crashed its lunar lander into the surface of the moon, NASA says it thinks it’s spotted the site of impact.
Israel attempted to become the first country to land a private spacecraft on the moon on April 11. But, things quickly unraveled shortly after the Beresheet lander began its descent.
Mission control was forced to reset the main engine when it was around a dozen miles from the surface but ultimately failed to get it all working again; unable to slow itself down, Beresheet plummeted and broke apart.
A new image captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on April 22 shows a fresh impact site on a region of the moon called Sea of Serenity likely created by the high-speed collision.
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A series of ‘before’ images of the area from the last decade and as recently as 16 days before the crash revealed a new feature in line with what Beresheet would have created. NASA has used a 2016 photo (above) for comparison because of the lighting conditions on that day
Beresheet is about 5 feet (1 meter) tall by 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) wide with its landing gear and legs deployed
Beresheet will stay in Earth’s orbit for about a month, slowly widening its ellipse until it reaches apogee, or its farthest point from here, at nearly 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometres) away.
It will then be slowly introduced to the orbit of the moon.
Lunar surface operations are meant to last just two days. Beresheet will measure the magnetic field at the landing site,
