Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Triumph of a Failed Moon Landing

Episode Date: April 17, 2019

The Beresheet lunar lander failed in the last few kilometers of its descent to the Moon. Two days later we learned that its team would try again. Deputy Mission Director Yoav Landsman is back with an inspiring and revealing look behind the scenes. Planetary Society Digital Editor Jason Davis looks forward to the launch of LightSail2 now that a second SpaceX Falcon Heavy has enjoyed spectacular success. And your guide to the busy night sky is provided by Bruce Betts. Special program note: Catch Mat Kaplan on the Discovery Channel documentary about Beresheet, Return to the Moon, Sunday, April 21st at 11:00am Eastern. You can learn more about this week’s guests and topics at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/0417-2019-yoav-landsman-beresheet.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The triumph of a failed moon landing, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. We had a failure in the spacecraft. We unfortunately have not managed to land successfully. We are the seventh country to orbit the Moon and the fourth to reach the Moon's surface. It's a tremendous achievement up to now.

Well, we didn't make it, but we definitely tried. And I think that the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous. I think we can be proud. That was what we heard when it was clear that Bereshit, the little lunar lander from Space IL in Israel, had been lost. The last voice was Morris Kahn, chairman of Space IL and a major donor to the project. We're minutes away from another visit with the Deputy Mission Director, Yoav Lanzman. Bruce Betts will join us, as always, for What's Up, and we've got Planetary Society Digital

Editor Jason Davis on the second successful flight of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. First, though, some announcements of our own. The next few weeks are going to be some of the busiest in the history of planetary radio. I'll be at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for the annual CubeSat Developers Workshop. More about that with Jason. Saturday, April 27th, we'll bring a family-oriented event at the Central Library in Pasadena, California. I'll join Bruce Betts for a conversation about his great book,

Astronomy for Kids. On May 1st, I'll be with Bill Nye, Bruce, and the leaders of the effort to defend our planet from near-Earth objects for the Planetary Defense Conference at the University of Maryland. We've got a free public event that evening that may be sold out by the time you hear this, but we'll have highlights on a future episode. On May 8th, we'll take Planetary Radio Live to Science Museum Oklahoma in Oklahoma City. Details for that big event are still to come, but Bill and I will be there. Lastly, I'll be back in Washington, D.C. for this year's Humans to Mars Summit from May 14 to 16, hosting the live webcast.

Be sure to say hi if you're at any of these. We've got links on the show page at planetary.org slash radio. Jason, it was in an April 11 blog post at planetary.org that you chronicle the latest success by SpaceX. They've done it again with the Falcon Heavy. Yeah, the Falcon Heavy has now flown a second successful time. And this time it was for a paying customer. So that's a great sign that the rocket is now becoming trustworthy and fully operational. And yeah, it's also, of course,

a great sign for the Planetary Society because we will be on the next Falcon Heavy that launches. Yeah. And we're going to get to that, of course, in a moment. Were you watching live as all this stuff happened? Oh, yes, definitely. Yeah, me too. It's like my modern sporting event to watch. It's that dramatic these days when something like that happens. So yes, definitely. Team sports for space geeks. That's what it was. And it really was exciting. And it's just amazing that all of it happens in this tiny, tiny slice of time from the launch to the landing, the successful landing of not only the side boosters this time, but that center core. Yeah. At one point, of course, everyone, a lot of people listening to this probably followed it you know there was a split screen where there were like four camera views going on oh yes or yeah one from each side booster one from the center core and then one from the upper stage still burning and um that's just i mean that's just

amazing essentially four vehicles flying by on their own um autonomously at that point um really cool stuff and to watch the course the two side boosters come down at Cape Canaveral, and then the center core land out at sea on the drone ship. Really neat that they managed to pull it all off. Now, as we speak, there is news that that center core, though it made it down successfully, had a little bit of bad luck after that. Yeah, we heard that on the way back to port, they ran into some high seas and the barge was rocking around and the center core fell over. So that's probably it for that center core. Fortunately for LightSail, the two side boosters, they're the only ones that are going to be reused. The center core, they weren't going to reuse for the next flight.

So that shouldn't affect any upcoming timelines. Perhaps the only two advantages to flying in space over sailing over the ocean, there are no waves and the salt water doesn't damage your booster. Yeah. And they do have some kind of little machine that comes out and grabs the booster to kind of hold it in place, some kind of robot. I think they call it the octograbber, but we haven't heard details yet on was that thing ever secured? Did it fall over with the octograbber holding onto it? So yeah, we're still kind of waiting on some more details on that. On to the most important payload on that next Falcon Heavy. Do I sound a little prejudiced? Yes, very important. The most important.

Since they're going to be something like 25. Yeah. What's the current status of light sail? I'm hoping to see it next week at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Do you think I'm going to have a shot? Yeah, I think you will. It is still up there in storage right now at Cal Poly. They just took it out a couple of weeks ago for a quick software update. They'd made some changes to the solar sailing algorithm to make it more efficient, pulled it out and they recharged the batteries while they were at it. So it should still be up there in storage until at least early next month before it ships to the Air Force Research Lab in Albuquerque. And that's where it meets up with Prox One. It's some kind of mothership. With the pretty much perfect flight, second flight of this Falcon Heavy that we've just witnessed, what's the outlook? Do we have any idea when we may see this launch? And I should say that the major payload is the Air Force said on Twitter that, because everything's on Twitter these days, that they were targeting June for the STP-2 launch. That's the name of the primary payload on our flight.

And that lines up with some of the last dates that we had heard. We were hearing it no earlier than May 31st. That pretty much means June. So with any luck, you know, that'll hold. But we've been waiting a long time for this and things change. So, you know, it's always possible that this will slip further down the road. But right now it looks like we're targeting June. All right.

We'll just tell everybody, stay tuned, because there will be quite a celebration surrounding this next launch of the Falcon Heavy and our LightSail 2 spacecraft. this next launch of the Falcon Heavy and our LightSail 2 spacecraft. A lot of it happening in Florida at the Cape with opportunities for a lot of you listening to get involved. But even if you don't head for the Cape, of course, we will through all of our channels, including this show,

be covering that launch and the mission of LightSail 2, the solar sail from the Planetary Society. With a lot of that coverage led by the guy we're talking to, Jason Davis, digital editor for the Planetary Society and our embedded reporter there. Thanks for these updates, Jason. Thank you, as usual, Matt. Here's Morris Kahn of SpaceIL speaking in an informal video just two days after the failed attempt by Bereshet to land on the moon.

This evening, I've got an announcement for you. In the light of all the support that I've got from all over the world and the wonderful messages of support and encouragement and excitement, I've decided that we are going to actually establish Vereshit Steyr. We're going to actually build a new halalit, a new spacecraft, we're going to put it on the moon and we're going to actually build a new halalit, a new spacecraft. We're going to put it on the moon, and we're going to complete the mission. Tomorrow morning, first thing, we have a task force to begin to sit down and plan the project and begin the work. Thank you, and good luck to all of us.

Space IL's Morris Kahn announcing that there will be a Beresheet 2. Less than two days later, on Monday, April 15th, I reconnected with Yoav Landsman. Many of you heard my first conversation with the Beresheet Deputy Mission Director in our February 27th episode, not long after the launch. As you'll hear, Yoav and the SpaceIL team have much to be thankful for. Yoav, welcome back to Planetary Radio. I think this is the first time in all the years we've been doing this show that I can offer both condolences and congratulations at the same time. Indeed, congratulations to you and the entire team at Space IL on what was a magnificent achievement, even though it didn't quite end the way you had hoped. Thank you so much, Matt. Like many, many others out there, I was watching the live webcast. It was hugely exciting,

and we could feel the excitement in the room as well. Were you there? Was I looking at the back of your head there in the control room? I was actually at the left side near the mission director. I was the deputy mission director. So you probably saw me sometimes when the camera was focused on our table, which was the perpendicular table at the left. I'm sure I did. It was going so well. I mean, I've now read that you actually had telemetry down to just 149 meters, less than 500 feet above the surface of the moon. But of course, it was a little bit above that level that something went wrong. I mean, what can you say about what happened after the mission had gone so well up until

that point? Yeah, the first minutes of the landing, I just heard today someone from the guidance and control group that said that it looks exactly like the simulations. It was perfect. Then things started to go wrong. It began with an IMU unit, an inertial measurement unit, which gives us measurements of angular velocities and accelerations. It went off.

We're still investigating why. Although this is not the main cause of the problem because we have redundancy for that unit. But it started, apparently it started a cascade of events that ended with the main engines shutting off. It tried to start over again, but something didn't let that happen. And I have to emphasize this. The engine was fine. The engine was not the problem.

The problem was something with the electricity, with the electronics. I don't want it to be interpreted into having said that something is wrong with the engine. For the suppliers of our engines, you did good. That's a very important point because I think a lot of people hearing that the engine shut down assumed that there was a problem with the engine itself. No, the details are still under investigation. So I will not give any specific details. But I have to say that in order for an engine to work, you need also the electronics that interfaces with the valves of the engine that let the liquids, the propellant and the oxidizer to flow into the combustion chamber.

You need the power, the electrical power in order to move the solenoid in the valves to move. And you need the communication between the computer and the electronic box that send the commands for the valve to open. So it's a whole system that have to work together in a very accurate manner. So if something is wrong in the command or in the electronics, then it will interfere with the engine ability to work. to fill with the engine ability to work. So it's still under investigation, but we can assure that the engine was not the problem. Well, that's good to hear,

since I assume it may very well be the same engine that will be used if and when a second spacecraft makes this attempt, which is something we'll get to in a few minutes. But is this just another example of that cliche that is nevertheless true that space is hard? Well, space is hard. And we struggled along the way with all kinds of anomalies and weird things that we have to deal with. We had lots of work during the mission in order to solve problems and to find solutions and to investigate anomalies.

So it was hard all the way. But if you have a failure during an orbit, then you have most of the time, you have time to find out what happened and to solve it. During the landing, once we pass the point of no return, which you may have heard in the broadcast, after 24 seconds from the beginning of the breaking, seconds from the beginning of the braking, we pass the point of no return. From there, it's impossible to go back into orbit. If an anomaly or if a failure even begins before that, then the main engine shuts down and the spacecraft is still in orbit for a lot of revolutions around the moon. So we have enough time to find what happened and to save the day.

But after that, if something critical happens, then everything has to be autonomous. You have very small chance of intervening in the autonomous reactions of the main computer. So it means that during the design, we have to figure out what can go wrong and find autonomous protocols to solve it. I assume that this is the sort of thing that you did your very best to model and simulate while the spacecraft was being developed. But it is evidence also that as sophisticated as

the simulation may be, you can never duplicate entirely what a spacecraft is going to go through when it's actually out there in the void and is captured and is descending to the surface of another world. That's true. Actually, during the entire mission, the problems we had that gave us the hardest headaches are the problems we didn't thought of before, that we couldn't have tested or we couldn't find out, or just things that probably have something to do with the environmental conditions, such as radiations, which may cause the computer risk on our first trial and on the beginning of the mission. The learning itself is something that you absolutely cannot check, cannot test end-to-end on the earth because you don't have the same gravity

here you can't have the the spacecraft to move in the same velocities in any test facilities you just can't do that so you have to depend on simulations and partial tests in several settings. For example, we took the entire navigation system, put it on a crane in order to see how it finds out the altitude above the surface. So we took the same navigation system on a plane and did some maneuvers, but it's not even close to the velocities during the landing, which is the velocities of a missile. We can't test that.

And you can test that in vacuum and you can test that with the gravity of the moon. And you can't test that with working engines, with working rocket engines. So many of the procedures are tested only by simulations or in partial settings. Yeah, it reminds me of how much bigger organizations, NASA, JPL, would take components and put them on airplanes. I know this happened with some of the landing system for the Curiosity rover. And, you know, we'll remind the audience of missions with budgets in the billions of dollars that have failed in somewhat similar ways because it is impossible to model or simulate everything that a spacecraft is going to go through. Can you say at this point, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, that just this

experience and all the can say that as someone with experience with development and operations of communication satellites before, I worked 11 years with the Amos satellite. I've seen lots of kinds of failures during the orbit insertion part and during the operations part. And this is something completely different. To get to the moon is much more complex, even though at first view you can say that only the physics is a bit more complex. But we understand the principles. So what can be different? But it is.

It is. It's much different. And communication, we found out during the mission that communication is much, much harder to achieve than it was simulated in the trainings. This is the main challenge of a long-distance mission, I think. This is something that when you talk to people about challenges of a deep space mission, I don't think this is the first choice, the first guess of what is the big challenge. We've heard Morris Kahn, in his announcement, made just two days after the landing attempt that there will be a Bereshet-2. And of course, he's in a good position to say that as both the chairman of SpaceIL and a major funder of this project.

Was that a great thing to hear? It was an extraordinary thing to hear. We were very excited about that. We actually expected the project to just end and for us to look for the next challenge, next job. But it's something that means a lot to have another chance to end the mission as we planned it. In the next time, we will be with more experience and we know how to fix the things that make this mission very hard for us. We know how to make things better and much more reliable

and we will have another chance to attempt landing. And this time, I hope we could achieve what we were planning to soft land the spacecraft on the surface of the moon. had not had this opportunity for a second attempt, I imagine this would have looked really good on the resumes of all of you on the team as you look for other work. But it is awfully satisfying to know that you're going to be able to take what you've learned and try again. Can you talk about, it's awfully early to talk about this as you just get this second attempt underway. But what kinds of things will change? I mean, what will you be able to do better based on the challenges you faced in this mission? It is too early to talk about that.

Okay. I don't know yet, but I think that some of the infrastructures and some of the computer logic the behavior of the spacecraft needs to readjust to our experience and after we finish investigating the landing process and what went wrong we will probably have to find out how to make things better in order to increase the probability of success. Okay, so that's one unfair question. Here's another. How soon do you think it might be possible that another spacecraft will be built and ready to put on top of a rocket? This is difficult to answer.

Yes. It depends because in any spacecraft, even if you have a full design, there are some long lead items. You have to purchase several hardware units that are not available as off-the-shelf units. And it takes time to manufacture them and test them before you get them for the first time.

It's like the structure and the propulsion system and several more systems. It takes time. I think that we have to look into it carefully to see if a project like that can happen in less than, let's say, two years. As I said, it's very early now to estimate all these things. Of course. And in fact, you've told us more in that answer than I was even expecting to hear. So I appreciate that. In the meantime, there have been statements about how others may be able to take advantage

of the advances that SpaceIL has been able to make. I think Israel Aerospace Industries has said that they have interest now in using some of these technologies. And there are some technologies that were developed. I think of our conversation last time about the development of the landing legs for Bettersheet, but I bet that there are others as well. Do you expect to see some of what you were able to create, not off the shelf, but what had to be developed for this mission to be of use elsewhere? Sure. First of all, I think that the whole spacecraft can be used as a platform of getting payloads to the lunar surface or into lunar orbit.

Depends on the required payload for all kinds of missions. required payload for all kinds of missions. And I know there is a huge demands to send scientific payloads and other kinds of payloads to the moon right now. So I believe we can use this spacecraft as a platform or the Israeli aerospace industry can use the same platform as a commercial platform for other kinds of missions, not necessarily exactly as our project was, but for something, for new projects, new spin-offs, if you like. Well, that would be an important success to come out of this mission. But I'm thinking of the

primary success that you were looking for, the primary goal of this mission, which was, of course, to soft land on the moon, but also to provide inspiration for a nation, for young people in that nation, and in fact, perhaps young people around the world. How would you evaluate the success of Bereshit in that effort? It certainly seems to have succeeded. at the youth in Israel, but I'm still getting messages from people that I don't know, that apparently know me from social media, from all around the world, from places I've never been in, that say that they followed our journey and they were watching the landing broadcasts with their children. It's very exciting to read this. It's very... I was crying while reading all these messages because it was wonderful to see that.

I believe we touched a lot of people in the world and it's great. It's way more than we ever anticipated and more than we hoped for. And I think we did good there. I can assure you that you did. I can also assure you, as you probably heard, that in this country, the United States, you had a huge and enthusiastic audience. And of course, I was among them. I want to leave you with this. I was looking again, just before we started this conversation, at the last image to come from this spacecraft. And it was, of course, that pretty stunning photo that was taken on the far

side of the moon, with, of course, the spacecraft visible in the foreground, that little sign that was put on the spacecraft designed so that it would be in these shots. That is a tremendously affecting image. And we'll include it on the episode page this week that people can find at planetary.org slash radio. But I'm going to bet that most of the people in our audience have seen it and were as inspired and enthusiastic about it as I am. Yeah, that was a great image and we planned on capturing it and download it during the landing just for this case, in case we don't make it to the ground safely, we could have done it. We could have downloaded it in such a good resolution only thanks to the Deep Space Network of NASA. We are so happy that we could do that.

And it's a great image. It's a wonderful part of the legacy of this mission. And for all of you on this team, please share the Planetary Society's congratulations and gratitude for this attempt, which was much more than an attempt. It was in so many ways very successful, Yoav. And I look forward to talking to you again as Bereshit 2 comes together and prepares for that trip that it will make to the moon. It will be my pleasure. Thank you. Beresheet Deputy Mission Director and Senior Systems Engineer Yoav Lanzmann. I thought it would be fun to go back to Diamandis of the XPRIZE Foundation and Google co-founder

Larry Page made an announcement that would incentivize teams around the world to set their sights on the moon. Though no team won, the benefits of the Google Lunar XPRIZE are undeniable. Today we're challenging private teams from around the world to design and build robotic explorers and race them to the surface of the moon. The Google Lunar X Prize is a competition that will once again demonstrate that small dedicated teams of individuals can do what was thought only once possible by governments.

We believe that these kind of contests and setting an ambitious goal like going to the moon is really a good way to improve improve the state of humanity in the world and that's why we care about this it's also going to be a great competition a lot of fun i hope that a small team very ambitious team of people will allow us all virtually go back to the moon very soon so i couldn't be more excited about that allowed us all virtually to go back to the moon very soon. So I couldn't be more excited about that. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We are joined by the chief scientist of the Planetary Society.

Bruce Betts will tell us about the night sky and probably has a lot of other stuff in store for us, like a random space fact. Welcome back. Thanks, Matt. Good to be back. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Looking forward to this very busy period when we've got a lot of public events coming up,

including the Planetary Defense Council public event that you'll be on stage for. And we'll be doing Planetary Radio Live there on May 1st in Washington, D.C. That's the Planetary Defense Conference, not Council. Council? Well, it should be the council. Sorry, my mistake. It's the security council, Planetary Defense Security Council. Sorry about that. We're a permanent member.

That's good. We can veto everybody else. I'm embarrassed. Tell us what's up. Okay, let me see if I can embarrass myself. Shouldn't be too hard. In the evening sky, in the low in the west, we got Mars still hanging out kind of near Orion and near the orange-red star Aldebaran and Taurus. But Orion will keep setting more and more.

So get your Orion fix and check it out in the early evening in the west. early evening in the west. And then in the pre-dawn sky, still got a lineup of planets down low by the horizon are Venus and even Mercury hanging out near it. Mercury could be tough. Venus should be bright enough that if you have a clear view to the eastern horizon before dawn, you should be able to see it fairly easily. On the 2nd of May, the Moon will be hanging out near Venus. the moon will be hanging out near Venus. And sooner than that, the moon will be hanging out near Jupiter on the 23rd of April. And Jupiter is over in the south in the pre-dawn with Saturn in between Jupiter and Venus and kind of the southeast. All right, on to this week in space history. It was 1971. Salyut 1 was launched, the first space station. And then we had some Apollo follow-ups that I mentioned last week. We had Apollo 13 returned successfully in 1970,

successfully in that everyone lived. And then Apollo 16 landed on the moon successfully in 1972. Boy, it's going to be lots and lots of Apollo celebrations and remembrances over the next, man, three years. And I'm happy about that. Me too. We move on to Random Space Fact! I like that energy. 1036 Ganymede, not to be confused with Ganymede,

is the largest near-Earth object. It's the largest asteroid, about 35, largest near-Earth asteroid, meaning it comes within 1.3 AU of the sun. So kind of near the Earth's orbit at 1 AU. And Ganymede is about 35 kilometers in size. And Ganymede is about 35 kilometers in size, and it's not going to hit Earth for the foreseeable future, which is really good because it's really, really big. Well, that's good. You kind of saved the punchline for the end there. Yeah, well, because of our position on the Planetary Defense Council, I'm able to report this to you definitively.

We vetoed its impact. Yeah. Ganyed its impact. Ganymede impact veto! I want a big rubber stamp that says that. Also named after mythological Ganymede, but can't have two things spelled exactly the same, so it became Ganymede. Alright, on to the trivia question. I asked you, where in the solar system is there a feature named Mozart? How'd we do, Matt?

Big response this time. A lot of people wanted to get in on this. I guess there are a lot of Mozart fans out there. Several people said, there are no Salieri features around the solar system. I did not know that. Yeah, you got to see Amadeus, right? We got this from this week's winner, Nara Hari in Sugarland, Texas. We've mentioned him a few times on the show, but I think it's his first win.

Mozart is a crater on Mercury, he says, right? That is correct. Big crater, 241 kilometers. Not bad. A fitting tribute. He says that technically Mozart's feature is also on the Golden Records aboard the two Voyager spacecraft. And we heard that as well from a lot of folks out there. We also had a whole bunch of people tell us that there is asteroid 1034 Mozartia, which might have qualified, but that's an asteroid, not really a feature on another body. So I don't know if we'd have taken that or not. Harry or Narahari, congratulations.

You're getting this week's Planetary Society kick asteroid, rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. We got some other stuff, of course, from Torsten in Germany, who can always be counted on for this kind of stuff. He says it was another of Mozart's smash hits. And just like his music, Out of This World. This is not terribly space-related, but Bob Klain, who really ought to be locked up for a lot of the puns he makes. I looked all over the solar system to figure out where the feature named Mozart was. Hayden, back and forth I looked, but no gluck.

I thought it might be too much to handle, but then I looked closer to the sun and I found the crater Mozart on Mercury. Four puns in 255 words. Congratulations, Bob, I guess. Nice. Brian in Maricopa, Arizona. That crater on Mercury, both it and the real Mozart are slowly decomposing. It's kind of a pun, too. Finally, this for you from Ken in Dunlap, Illinois. I think you and Bruce need to look through your grade school poetry class notes to see if you can qualify for a creator because there are writers with features on Mercury named after them as well. Or maybe Bruce can write a poem about the majestic unfurling

of the light sail and qualify in 50 years. I'll get right on that. Because you have to be famous for 50 years, apparently. And you also have to have been dead for at least three. So you might want to think twice. I never was very good at poetry. Just as well. We're ready for another one. No, we're not.

Oh, you're right. We're not this week. Because of the schedule that's coming up, and I'm going to have these back-to-back trips, including our time in Oklahoma, where we're doing a show. And then before that, May 1st, that Planetary Defense Conference show with Bruce, we're going to have to skip the contest this week. We apologize. We know that that must be terribly depressing to a lot of you. And Bruce too, apparently. a lot of you.

And Bruce too, apparently. Don't worry. It'll be back next week. Okay. I don't know what happens now. I know. It's almost unheard of. It's not unprecedented, but it's almost unheard of. You think you're up to finishing the show?

I hope so. I can do it. I'm a professional. All right, everybody. Go out there. Look up the night sky, and think about woofers and subwoofers. Thank you, and good night. I'm more of a tweeter myself. Actually, I don't really tweet that often. He's Bruce Betts.

He is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who, by the way, tweets at, at Random Space Fact. Clever, huh? He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its Shoot the Moon members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan, Ad Astra.