- 3298 - MARS - “Cubesat” small satellites? Spacecraft venturing beyond Earth need a propulsion system to get the spacecraft where it needs to go and a communications system powerful enough to receive commands and send observations back to Earth, making deep-space cubesat missions significantly more complicated than those staying in low Earth orbit.
--------------------- 3298 - MARS - “Cubesat” small satellites?
- When NASA's most recent Mars lander landed on to the Red Planet, it carried two tiny cubesats. The Mars Cube One (MarCO) mission's twin briefcase-sized satellites watched NASA's InSight lander touch down in November 2018, confirming that the infamous "six minutes of terror" landing sequence went smoothly before NASA's fleet of Mars orbiters could check in on the newest arrival.
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- The MarCO cubesats, affectionately nicknamed “Wall-E” and “Eva“, blazed the trail for other small satellites to adventure beyond Earth's orbit.
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- Every mission is governed by unavoidable tradeoffs between spacecraft size, mission cost and technological and scientific sophistication, and spacecraft are never quite large enough for all of the payloads that scientists think would be nice to have on board.
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- That applies particularly harshly to the smallest of spacecraft, “cubesats“. These tiny spacecraft are built in standardized units about 4 inches cubed; a full satellite is typically one, three or six units in size, making these explorers about the size of a breadbox.
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- MarCO combined work of cubesats with a Mars flyby carefully orchestrating things so the little spacecraft could monitor InSight's landing.
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- The twin MarCO satellites fell silent in January 2019 after settling into orbit around the sun.
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- “Ingenuity” is a 4-pound helicopter that became the first powered aircraft to fly on Mars. Nearly six months into a one-month mission, Ingenuity has made 13 flights on Mars, far beyond its initial goal of five, and has shown the role that small aerial scouts can play in exploration missions.
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- Unlike the MarCO spacecraft, Ingenuity didn't make its own way to Mars; instead, it spent the ride to the Red Planet tucked away in “Perseverance“. That arrangement saved the aircraft from needing to protect itself or navigate in deep space proper.
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- Ingenuity also relies on the rover for communication with its handlers, simplifying another difficult piece of the cubesat puzzle. Those sacrifices balance out the little chopper's sharp cameras and the technology needed to fly in the thin atmosphere of Mars.
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- “Lunar Flashlight“ is designed to map ice hidden in the permanently shadowed craters near the moon's south pole. When NASA asked for ideas for cubesats to launch on the first flight of the megarocket Space Launch System (SLS) cubes sat was a chance to design a mission to figure out the story of lunar ice.
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- “NEA Scout” space probe is headed to an asteroid known as “2020 GE“. The European Space Agency (ESA)'s Hera mission, scheduled to launch in 2024, will carry two cubesats inside the primary spacecraft.
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- The mission is designed to follow up on a NASA mission launching later this year, the “Double Asteroid Redirection Test” (DART), which will hurl itself into the small moon of an asteroid to try nudging the rock along its orbit, a planetary defense technique scientists have in mind in case a space rock ever seriously threatens Earth.
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- The main spacecraft of “Hera” will arrive about four years after that impact and investigate the scene, helping scientists to precisely determine the consequences of the impact. And after three months working on its own, Hera will deploy two cubesats to approach the impact site more closely.
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- The cubesats are more agile, but also you might be less cautious because you don't risk the full mission. You can afford more risks with a cubesat.
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- Like Lunar Flashlight, the Hera cubesats, dubbed “Juventas” and “Milani“, have been through a few different iterations. A previous mission design had two smaller companion cubesats arriving early enough to watch the impact, a flashier but also riskier arrangement; the final design doubles the size of each cubesat and gives debris from the impact time to settle.
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- Like the Lunar Flashlight cubesat and a host of other missions, “Lunar Trailblazer“, which is scheduled to launch in 2024, will study water on the moon. Lunar Trailblazer, which fits in a $55 million cost cap, may prove a model for projects that are less expensive than a traditional planetary mission but able to host larger instruments than a cubesat can.
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- October 7, 2021 - MARS - “Cubesat” small satellites? 3298
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