Israel's Beresheet, the privately funded mission to the moon, has crashed. The spacecraft aimed to perform a soft landing on the moon suffered a technical glitch and crashed on the suface of the moon on Thursday. If this tragic incident didn't take place, Beresheet spacecraft would have made Israel the fourth nation in the world to soft land on the lunar surface after Russia, China and the US. "I am sorry to say that our spacecraft didnot make it in one piece to the moon" said Opher Doron, the manager of Israel Aerospace Industries Space Division. "We made it all the way to the moon and this is a great accomplishment. We are the seventh country to make it all the way to the moon" he added. Earlier in 2008, India had crash landed its Moon Impact Probe as part of Chandrayaan-1. Built by a private space start up SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, the Beresheet spacecraft costs $100 million. Beresheet weighed just about 585 kilograms and it became the first privately funded satellite to orbit the moon. The space craft was lifted into space on board the Falcon 9 rocket on February 22, 2019.
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