In the beginning, Barashit heads for the moon this week on planetary radio.

Welcome, I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond.

In a few weeks, a small Israeli nonprofit may do something that only the three most advanced spacefaring nations have accomplished.

In Hebrew, Barashit means in the beginning.

The lunar lander with that name has begun its journey. in the engineers, techs, and scientists behind this mission.

And we'll hear from Associate Producers Mary Liz Bender,

who was at the launch, and met a Space IL team member who oversees

what the mission is really all about.

Later, another what's up visit with Planetary Society Chief

Scientist Bruce Betts.

Jason Davis is the Society's digital editor.

He's back to share his reporting on the Japanese mission

that has just reached a major milestone. Jason, it has been such a busy past few days

and it's not going to let up for a while in space exploration, but we're going to focus in on mainly on Hayabusa 2. You have done some great work on this.

Yeah, so Hayabusa last Friday touched down successfully.

That was obviously the biggest moment of the mission so far.

It fired a bullet into the surface of Ryuguoo and captured some material that sprayed up and safely backed away from the asteroid.

So that was a huge success.

We're still waiting for some more pictures to come down and see what exactly happened when it was close to the surface, but we did see one really cool picture where you can see the spacecraft shadow and a little dark splotch where the thrusters turned on and kind of sprayed away some of the fine material on the surface.

So big success for them and we're looking forward to hearing more soon.

Just spectacular to see those shadows.

You've got the other one where the spacecraft is farther away.

...