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While everyone was defenseless upwards in the spectacle of NASA's latest Mars landing, there was some other important event happening nearby. Two tiny cubesats traveling along with InSight came online, effulgent data back to Earth from InSight. No one has ever sent i of these small, off-the-shelf satellites then far abroad earlier. Could this herald a new era in low-cost exploration of the solar system?

The spacecraft, known as MarCO-A and MarCO-B (Mars Cube One), went to space aboard the aforementioned rocket that launched InSight in May of this year. Withal, they didn't share any systems with NASA's Mars lander. They just coasted along with InSight on the same Mars-leap trajectory. They floated along for 301 million miles (484 one thousand thousand kilometers) with InSight, but they aren't landers. The dinky spacecraft floated on past Mars but not before proving themselves worthy of a deep space consignment.

Cubesats are low-cost satellites designed for bones infinite research. They're called cubesats because a unmarried unit (or 1U) is a 10-centimeter cube. The smallest cubesats are 1U, just some missions telephone call for 2U, 3U, or larger cubesats. In the case of Mars Cube One, NASA went with a 6U design. The total cost of the project was $xviii million, significantly less than other deep space probes.

NASA initially tested these tiny craft with a photo of Earth several weeks afterward launch, and so we didn't hear anything else from them until InSight had its large moment. The cubesats came online and used their experimental high-gain antennas to relay data from InSight dorsum to Earth, thus proving pocket-sized-scale satellites are a feasible style to explore the solar system.

The MarCO mission relied on very little custom NASA hardware. MarCO-A and MarCO-b (nicknamed EVE and WALL-E, respectively) both had an off-the-shelf photographic camera module. NASA pinged them to get photos of Mars, but MarCO-A's system didn't work correctly. MarCO-B managed to beam dorsum some shots of Mars, from which NASA will exist able to glean some atmospheric data. The photo in a higher place came from the satellite at an altitude of 4,700 miles (7,600 km) equally the probes drifted away from Mars.

MarCO-A and MarCO-B only accept rudimentary cold-gas propulsion likened to a burn extinguisher — that'southward why the team jokingly nicknamed the spacecraft later the fire extinguisher-wielding robots from the Pixar film. They can't brand major grade changes, but NASA hopes their systems will piece of work long enough to send back some data virtually objects they may run across every bit they near the asteroid belt. In that location's no guarantee that will happen, but there will almost certainly exist more deep space cubesats following in EVE and WALL-Due east'southward footsteps.

At present read: NASA May Sell Tickets to Space Tourists, NASA Will Utilize ISS Supercomputer for Scientific discipline Experiments, and Here'south What'due south Next for NASA'due south InSight Mars Lander