PROVIDENCE – A Brown University professor who worked on the Apollo missions to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s is playing a key role in the effort to land the first commercial spacecraft on the moon next week.
James W. Head III, a geological sciences professor, helped select the landing site for the unmanned craft built by Israeli company SpaceIL, according to the university.
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The spacecraft – called “Beresheet,” which is Hebrew for “genesis” or “in the beginning” – launched from Florida in February and it entered orbit around the moon on Thursday, Brown said. SpaceIL will attempt to land Beresheet next Thursday.
Head was asked to advise mission leaders about the landing site because of his experience working on NASA’s Apollo program in which he analyzed potential landing sites, studied lunar samples and data and provide training for Apollo astronauts.
Using Head’s recommendations, the team chose a site near the northern edge of Mare Serenitatis, a vast lava plain that is relatively free of boulders.
The location is also a good place to study the magnetic properties of the lunar surface, the primary objective of the SpaceIL lander.
Brown said the SpaceIL mission grew out of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, which offered $20 million for the first team to land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon. The deadline passed in March 2018 without a winner, but some finalists pressed forward with their projects.
The SpaceIL mission marks the start of a new era in space exploration in which private companies launch relatively inexpensive spacecraft that conduct only one or two crucial experiments, Head said in a Brown news release.
“It’s a little like the microsatellite revolution, when people realized that we don’t need to put freight trains into orbit in order to get things done,” said Head, who works in Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. “The challenge for us as scientists is to think about doing transformational lunar science one small experiment at a time. What that’s going to do is unleash the creativity of everybody in planetary geoscience, particularly the students who will lead these efforts moving forward.”
Head has also been working with another Google Lunar XPRIZE finalist, OrbitBeyond, which has a lunar mission planned for next year.
Brown said he and his students have been helping to plot areas where OrbitBeyond’s small lunar rover can traverse on the moon surface.
William Hamilton is PBN staff writer and special projects editor. You can follow him on Twitter @waham or email him at hamilton@pbn.com.
