NASA's Mars Cubesat mission was also a great success

While everyone was caught up in the spectacle of NASA's last landing on Mars, another important event was taking place nearby. Two tiny cubes traveling with InSight went online, sending data back to Earth from InSight. No one has yet sent one of these small standard satellites as far. Could this announce a new era in low-cost solar system exploration?

The spacecraft, known as MarCO-A and MarCO-B (Mars Cube One), went into space aboard the same rocket that launched InSight in May this year. However, they do not share any systems with NASA Mars Mars. They have just rubbed InSight on the same trajectory towards Mars. They sailed on InSight for 484 million kilometers, but they are not landers. The dinky spacecraft floated on Mars past, but not before being worthy of an assignment in space.

Cubesats are inexpensive satellites designed for basic space research. They are called cubesats because a single unit (or 1U) is a cube of 10 centimeters. The smaller cubesats are 1U, but some missions require 2U, 3U or bigger. In the case of Mars Cube One, NASA opted for a 6U model. The total cost of the project was $ 18 million, far less than other deep space probes.

NASA first tested these tiny machines with a photo of the Earth several weeks after launch. We did not hear from them until InSight had a great time. The cubesats arrived online and used their high gain experimental antennas to relay InSight 's data to Earth, thus proving that small – scale satellites are a viable way to explore the solar system.

The MarCO mission is based on very little custom NASA hardware. MarCO-A and MarCO-b (nicknamed EVE and WALL-E, respectively) both had a standard camera module. NASA asked them to take pictures of Mars, but the MarCO-A system was not working properly. MarCO-B has been able to retransmit Mars images from which NASA can obtain atmospheric data. The above photo comes from the satellite at an altitude of 4,700 km (7,600 km) while the probes were moving away from Mars.

MarCO-A and MarCO-B have only a rudimentary cold-gas propulsion equated with a fire extinguisher – this is why the team dubbed the spacecraft after the Pixar film's fire-extinguishing robots. NASA hopes their systems will work long enough to return data on objects they may encounter near the asteroid belt. There is no guarantee that this will happen, but there will almost certainly be more cubesats in the deep space that will follow the tracks of EVE and WALL-E.

Now read: NASA can sell tickets to space tourists, NASA will use the ISS supercomputer for its science experiments and here's what more needs to be done for NASA's InSight Mars Lander