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NASA / JPL-Caltech
- The NASA Mars InSight Lander was launched on May 5th and will reach the Red Planet on November 26th.
- But two small satellites, collectively called Mars Cube One, are also moving closer to the world.
- One of these "CubeSat" spacecraft the size of a backpack recently took a picture of Mars 8 million kilometers away.
- Mars shines bright red-orange in the photo, but the world is incredibly small and even conquered.
Mars is a pretty big planet, about nine times the mass of our moon. The latest scientific research also suggests that Mars, while resembling a giant desert, may contain enough groundwater and heat to support microbial life today.
But in the dark, deep depths of space, the rusty red world seems as humble and insignificant as the Earth.
NASA recently highlighted this reality with a new image taken by a tiny satellite that is approaching Mars.
The photo was taken about 8 million kilometers away by one of two CubeSats the size of a backpack, known as Mars Cube One, or MarCO.
ISRO / ISSDC / Emily Lakdawalla (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
The two satellites, MarCO-A and MarCO-B, respectively nicknamed by their creators "EVE" and "Wall-E", were launched on May 5th. should land on Mars on November 26th.
MarCO satellites are officially the smallest spacecraft ever passed beyond the moon. It's also a crucial test for NASA to see how much it can reduce its size, and up to where it can send it into the solar system.
The further a satellite of deep space can be small, the more the space agency can afford to build and launch it, but also faster and more often (because the powerful rockets remain very expensive).
Traveling at a speed of about 6200 km / h, both CubeSats have spent six months and have traveled some 248 million miles "chasing" Mars as the planet revolves around the sun. NASA expects them to both go into orbit during the landing of InSight, thus helping to relay unprecedented data on the lander's landing on Earth in time (relative).
Until then, MarCO systems are tested intermittently. On October 2, MarCO-B swayed Mars in camera, rotation, and communication tests and slammed the picture below.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
"We are waiting six months before arriving on Mars," said Cody Colley, head of the MarCO mission for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a press release. "The cruising phase of the mission is always difficult, so you have to take all the little wins when they come in. Finally, seeing the planet is definitely a big win for the team."
The photo was taken 8 million kilometers away, cosmically close, since the red planet is located on average 140 million kilometers from the Earth.
Still, Mars still looks like an infinitesimal red dot in the picture. (The objects on the periphery are part of the spaceship.)
Previously, the MarCO team honored Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" image using MarCO-B to photograph the Earth at a distance of 621,371 miles. The Earth also seemed weak on this image.
On the flip side, the image shows that Mars is not an infinite plane like the rest of the universe.
For someone like Elon Musk, who is trying to use his SpaceX rocket company to build a giant reusable spacecraft capable of reaching the red planet, the image could make Mars even more conquered. .
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