Israeli spacecraft snaps orbital selfie

Israeli spacecraft snaps orbital selfie

It’s a big blue marble — flanked by an Israeli flag.

The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet took its first selfie more than 23,000 miles from earth.

And alongside the planet Earth — when the photo was snapped, it showed Australia — the picture includes a plaque installed on the spacecraft that shows an Israeli flag and the words “Am Yisrael Chai” and “Small Country, Big Dreams.”

The spacecraft transmitted the image back to the control room, which is in Yehud, in central Israel.

Several days earlier, the spacecraft conducted a successful maneuver to put it into an elliptical orbit around the Earth. It had missed a scheduled maneuver when its computer reset unexpectedly and automatically canceled the engine burn, but it remains on schedule to touch down on the moon on or around April 11.

JTA

 

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