The third maneuver of the Beresheet spacecraft was successful and it is already in an orbit with a record height of 270 thousand km

Bereshit is on its way to an elliptical orbit where the farthest point from the Earth is in Merik at about 270 thousand km

Today at 15:11 a successful maneuver of the Bereshit spacecraft was performed by the engineering team of SpaceIL and the Aerospace Industry. Dr. Ido Entavi, CEO of SpaceIL opened the press briefing and said: "We are now after the third maneuver of the Genesis spacecraft. The maneuver was a successful maneuver. This was a more complex maneuver due to the limitations we have on the star tracker. The spaceil engineering team and the aerospace industry had to plan a more complex maneuver to ensure a proper maneuver and we were able to do it. We moved to an elliptical orbit where the farthest point is about 270 km from the Earth."

"The main engine ran without a problem for about 152 seconds. The maneuver itself was done without communication with the ground stations as we always do the maneuvers because of the geometrical conditions in front of the ground stations. After the maneuver, the telemetry came back to us and we could see initial results of the maneuver, but immediately after that we experienced a disconnection in communication with the ground station, but that was due to a problem with the ground station itself."

"After about twenty minutes we received communication with another ground station, from the first telemetry data we received it appears that the maneuver was successful, the spacecraft is functioning properly, all the parameters are normal. We will investigate the information after we download it from the spacecraft and we are preparing for the next maneuver that will take place in about two weeks."

Ofer Doron, director of the aerospace industry's Mabat Space plant: "All in all, all the spacecraft's systems are working as planned. Everything is normal and functional in it. We are on the course we planned to be on, although we will take measurements to get accurate results. It was a bit nerve wracking today but started well, ended well, according to the plan.

In response to the journalists' question, Dr. Antabi said: "One more maneuver is planned to be performed in orbit around the Earth in the format we performed today. And the maneuver after that will be a maneuver to capture the moon."

He was also asked about the consequences of the malfunction in the star tracker and answered: "The limitations of the star tracker as we learned during the mission and the preliminary maneuver required us to direct the spacecraft in a very specific orientation so that the star tracker could give us a good picture of the route we are taking. It had to be planned, it is a very complex planning done by the Plate Dynamics people. A plan that at certain stages also included the darkening of that star tracker so that it would not receive wrong information and we went through all of this safely. It is estimated that the malfunction in the star tracker will not interfere with the maneuver to capture the moon."