NASA’s InSight lander successfully touched down on the surface of Mars on Nov. 26 to enormous fanfare worldwide. The mission’s engineers, including a team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, were able to stay in contact with the vessel thanks to two cube satellites that were tested and prepped by Cal Poly engineers and students just before launch.
The twin communication satellites, dubbed “MarCo” or “Mars Cube One” were the first “CubeSats” to reach another planet from Earth, according to Ryan Nugent, a staff aerospace engineer at Cal Poly. The MarCos are roughly a foot tall, 8 inches wide, and 4 inches deep, much smaller than normal satellites, which are similar in size to an average car.
The team at Cal Poly began prepping the satellites back in late February and continued the work up until May, when the instruments were sent down to Vandenberg Air Force Base before InSight launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
The two satellites separated from the main craft after breaking Earth’s orbit but continued on their way to the red planet. Over the next few months, the cube sats were relatively silent as they calculated and followed their coordinates.
On Nov. 26, the MarCo’s softball-sized radios kicked on and began transmitting information from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the planet since 2006.
In past missions, the orbiter received the information from NASA’s landers while the craft descended to the red planet’s surface. There was a problem however: The orbiter could only either receive or send information, so engineers at JPL and NASA headquarters had to wait around four hours to learn whether their half-a-billion-dollar spacecraft had successfully landed or crashed 33 million miles away.
The MarCos in theory would fix that, and on Nov. 26, their dual transmitting radios were put to the test. The twin satellites passed with flying colors, according to NASA officials, who said post launch they received minute-by-minute updates from the CubeSats.
Farah Alibay, a systems engineer at JPL for four years, told the Sun in May, just before the mission launched, that the satellites’ success would be critical for similar missions in the future.
“A lot of people in the CubeSat community are looking at this mission to be a sort of pioneer and to see what they can achieve,” she said. “Once we know the capabilities, we can start dreaming even bigger.”
According to NASA and JPL officials, the InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport) mission will revolve around the lander using two main instruments—a seismometer and a heat probe (the Heat Flow and Physical Properties package). The seismometer will be used to measure the red planet’s seismic activity, or “marsquakes,” and by doing so will help scientists ascertain Mars’ planetetary thickness and what the interior is composed of. The heat probe—which is described by the mission’s engineers as a “self-hammering nail”—should show JPL just how much internal heat the planet possesses or produces.
The CubeSats’ mission objective is independent of InSight’s.
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 6, 2018.