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For the first time in 2018, NASA decided to send two CubeSats on mission beyond the Earth's orbit. The idea was to test them for their effectiveness and potential in deep space exploration. Unfortunately, since late December (2018) and early January (2019), the space agency is no longer in contact with satellites.
CubeSat is a standardized "miniature" satellite type, the size of a large cereal box, used in space research. The lost CubeSats are two MarCO probes, named EVE and WALL-E, in the honor of Pixar science fiction movie studios. They were sent with the InSight module on mission to the Red Planet on May 5th.
On November 26, InSight began to land on Earth, while MarCO satellites were sending the state of landing to Earth. At NASA, the mission team was very happy to be able to follow the steps of InSight almost in real time, which would not be possible without EVE and WALL-E. Other larger spacecraft also collected insight landing data on Mars, but not far from it, the efficiency could be compared to that of two tiny satellites. For the agency, it is imperative to return as soon as possible to the landings to diagnose the failures and to try to solve them.
The participation of the two satellites ended just after the landing of InSight. Everything had been put to the test, EVE and WALL-E having pbaded successfully. According to MarCO, she has been able to prove the capability of her technology. From there, the satellites remained in orbit around the Sun for about a month, until communication with the Earth was interrupted: the first and the following week,
. what happened, although there are certain badumptions. It is possible that the probes simply had an electronic stop or that the gas needed to propel their antennas and direct them to Earth could have leaked and ended. Without the antennas that face us precisely, communication becomes impossible. Another possibility is that the satellites are so far away from the Sun that they have lost the ability to detect it and turn their panels to the star to stay energized. If that is the reason, in August, they should get closer to the Sun, with the ability to detect it and thus restore contact with NASA.
Be that as it may, even though the two CubeSats have never been more "reviewed", their "game" was of great importance to the space agency. To get an idea, InSight cost $ 830 million while both were built with a budget of only $ 18.5 million. For this reason, NASA already intends to use the same technology in its future missions, these extremely small satellites serving as a means of communication between deep space and the Earth.
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