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by acomjean 2631 days ago
Well they got very close. I really can't get enough of images from space. The gallery linked from the article was pretty good.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/science/space...

I haven't been able to find what it would have done had it landed correctly. (edit) I guess it had a few scientific instruments and a "time-capsule" of sorts. Wikipedia editors are fast, they already have the crash on there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceIL --------------- Payload

The spacecraft carried a "time capsule" created by the Arch Mission Foundation, containing over 30 million pages of analog and digital data, including a full copy of the English-language Wikipedia, the Wearable Rosetta disc, the PanLex database, a Nano Bible (complete Bible in Hebrew), children's drawings, a children's book inspired by the space launch, memoirs of a Holocaust survivor, Israel's national anthem (Hatikvah), the Israeli flag, and a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.[8][35][36][37][38]

Its scientific payload included a magnetometer supplied by the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science to measure the local magnetic field, and a laser retroreflector array supplied by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to enable precise measurements of the Earth–Moon distance.[39][40] ---------------------

As an aside, the youtube video series on the original Apollo launch computer it pretty neat. (The core memory on those old machines was nuts..)

https://www.youtube.com/user/mverdiell/videos