Success of Tiny Mars Probes Heralds New Era of Deep-Space Cubesats

[Judi Lynn]

By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | November 29, 2018 07:00am ET

The era of the interplanetary cubesat has definitively dawned.

Less than seven months ago, no tiny spacecraft had ever voyaged beyond Earth orbit. But two briefcase-size probes just blazed a trail all the way to Mars, covering 301 million deep-space miles (484 million kilometers) and beaming home data from NASA's InSight lander during the latter's successful touchdown on the Red Planet Monday (Nov. 26).

The tiny NASA craft, known as MarCO-A and MarCO-B, even photographed Mars and helped researchers collect some data about the planet's atmosphere during their flyby, mission team members said. [NASA's InSight Mars Lander: Full Coverage]

"This team of really mostly part-timers on the project has proven the technology that we were trying to demonstrate with this mission," MarCO chief engineer Andy Klesh, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said during a post-landing press briefing at JPL on Monday.

The main goals of the $18 million MarCO project (whose name is short for "Mars Cube One&quot , Klesh added, involve "being able to support a large craft like InSight, in order for it to perform its fantastic science," as well as showing "that we can take a smaller, focused more risk[y] mission out into the solar system," Klesh added.

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