Israel’s next lunar landings planned for 2025

Lulav Space’s landing sensor suite, powered by Ramon.Space’s space computing platform, selected for SpaceIL’s Beresheet 2 lunar missions.

By Abigail Klein Leichman, ISRAEL21c

Israeli space development organization SpaceIL plans a double landing on the Moon in 2025, aiming to continue in orbit for five years as a platform for science education activities.

SpaceIL cofounder and deputy CEO Kfir Damari reports that SpaceIL has chosen Beresheet 2’s landing sensors and navigation system — vision-based landing sensor algorithms from Lulav Space on a radiation-hardened computing platform from Ramon.Space – for the challenging two landings on both sides of the Moon.

The combined Israeli navigation solution is expected to deliver superior performance, durability and cost-efficiency in comparison to legacy radar or laser-based systems.

“The timely and consistent processing of complex algorithms in space make the difference between mission success and failure,” said Avi Shabtai, CEO at Ramon.Space.

“After being involved in over 50 space missions to date, an additional Israeli space mission to the Moon is very exciting and we expect our computing platform to be the engine that will power many more missions to come.”

Another Israeli product to be implemented in Beresheet 2 is Jupiter-Space technology from intelligent video transmission company Maris-Tech to manage camera operation, store and compress images and implement several mission algorithms on both lunar landers.

In addition, Swedish space company AAC Clyde Space has been contracted to provide the mission computer for the landers.

“It will execute the flight software, which performs all the mission tasks including communication with Earth, monitoring and handling failures, and management of the automatic landing system,” said Damari.

“Meanwhile, our software engineers team is writing the software that will be implemented on the computer. This software will be tested on the development model we’ll get in the next few days.”

Founded in 2011, SpaceIL launched its Beresheet 1 mission in 2019, a low-cost lunar program and the first private Moon mission that reached the Moon, although disappointingly it crashed on arrival.