Good afternoon readers and followers,

How were your Independrnce day celebration? Hopefully no one suffered from a post-party hangoverr.
We had quite a bit of traffic this week in our facebook page . After taking your requests to heart, please take mine - keep posting and telling us what you'd like to know about us :-)

An abundance of words were typed about the educational programs we've initiated, the talks we've given at places we've visited and about all the support we recieve, but certainly not enough about the technical part.
To correct that, we sat down with Shachar Mendelowitz, head of inertial navigation, who was just recently joined by two more control system engineers. All three are elbow-deep at work on the multiple camera system that will help with navigation and stabilization.
According to Shachar, there are 8 cameras on board the spaceship, working in parallel. These cameras are part of the optical based navigation system. The system will act as a GPS-replacement, as there is no GPS in outer space. Their mission: Supplying the main computer with exact attitude, velocity, height and position, in a very small and dense component, suitable for space environment. They will also use data acquired from LOLA, with which we can see these kinds of image.

To finish with a little anectode and a small teaser -  SpaceIL is the only Israeli non profit organization that will also have an arms export license, as demanded by Israel's law regarding space based organizations.

As I said before, stay tuned for a very small and distinguished guest that will make its way to our spaceship in the following months.

-- Adi Mendelowitz