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Two communications satellites from NASA's Mars Cube One mission, MarCO-A and MarCO-B, remain silent beyond March.
Named WALL-E and EVE in honor of the animated film "WALL-E", it is suitcases the size of a cubeSat. Launched last year, "they seem to have reached their limit" after traveling beyond the red planet, according to the agency statement. There has been more communication with them for more than a month and NASA engineers believe that it is unlikely that the situation will recover.
MarCO-A and MarCO-B served as communication relay during the landing on Mars of another NASA mission, the InSight probe. The WALL-E device sent great images of the red planet while the EVE was performing radiology work.
The last time the WALL-E sent something, it was December 29th and the EVE – January 4th. According to the calculations of the trajectory, the first must now be a distance of more than 1.6 million kilometers from Mars, the second – to nearly 3.2 million kilometers.
At this point, NASA experts admit different badumptions about the reasons for the loss of contact with the mission. The statement notes that WALL-E is showing leaks on the propeller and suggests that some activity control issues may have affected the ability to send and receive orders.
In any case, even if the engineers are not able to restore contact, they consider that their work is successful. "This mission has always been to push the boundaries of miniaturized technology and see where it could go," while "future CubeSats could go further," said chief engineer Andy Klesh . "There is great potential in these small devices," concluded another expert, John Baker.
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