A private Israeli company wants to have a small spacecraft land on the Moon with a launch this February, 2019. April 11th is the scheduled landing if all works.
SpaceIL is the name of the company.
“Beresheet,” or Genesis, is the name of the experimental vehicle which will focus on ever-changing magnetic fields that have been observed on the moon. Israel’s Weizmann Institute and NASA are the two agencies very interested in the magnetic field phenomena.
A a SpaceX Falcon rocket will launch the vehicle. SpaceX is Elon Musk's company.
SpaceIL has a project partner, the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries.
"Genesis" (Beresheet) contains artifacts on-board too - various pictures of the Israeli public, interpretive drawings by Israeli children and other pieces of national memorabilia, including stories of Holocaust survivors.
SpaceIL was founded in 2011 - its ambitious $95 million project, largely funded by South African-Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn and other donors, will spur a new wave of commercial missions to the moon and jump-start new companies.
Israel would become the fourth country to land a craft on the moon, after the U.S., the Soviet Union and China.
The Moon does not currently have a dipolar magnetic field (as would be generated by a semi-liquid geo-dynamo in its core) and the varying magnetization that is present is almost entirely crustal in origin. However, it is possible that the transient magnetic fields could be generated during large impact events.
Kicked up moon-dust, magnetically and electrically charged has been hypothesised to travel across the surface during periods of light/dark and when the moon moves through the Earth's magnetosphere tail.
ref: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars...il_080416.html
“Earth’s magnetotail extends well beyond the orbit of the moon and, once a month, the moon orbits through it,” says Tim Stubbs, a University of Maryland scientist working at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
“This can have consequences ranging from lunar ‘dust storms’ to electrostatic discharges.”
The moon spends about six days each month inside Earth's magnetic tail. The sun causes the tail appearance of the Earth's geomagnetic field.
Solar wind can provide charged particles, too; indeed, most of the time, the solar wind is the primary source. But when the moon enters the magnetotail, the solar wind is pushed back and the plasma sheet takes over.
The plasma sheet is about 10 times hotter than the solar wind and that gives it more "punch" when it comes to altering the charge balance of the moon's surface.
“Beresheet,” or Genesis will study this on the surface and report back what it finds.
ref: Space IL - http://www.spaceil.com/general/space...-moon-mission/