Two small CubeSats will accompany NASA’s InSight lander in 2016

CubeSats, or cube satellites, have become incredibly popular in recent years. They are small, relatively easy to design and build and inexpensive to place in orbit. Dozens of CubeSats currently orbit the Earth but, to date, none are in orbit around Mars. That will all change in 2016 when NASA launches the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander.

Two CubeSats, designed as communication relays, will accompany the stationary lander to the red planet. The small satellites are being built a technology demonstration by engineers as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Typical CubeSats are boxes about 4 inches square. Modular, off the shelf instruments are used inside the satellite to provide its capabilities. It’s a bit like apps for a smartphone, except that a CubeSat won’t hold nearly as many. Larger CubeSats are multiples of the 4 inch design, like multiple satellites stacked together.

The satellites being build at JPL, dubbed Mars Cube One (MAEXO) are six unit CubeSats about 14.4 by 9.5 inches.

They will launch on the same United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that carries the InSight lander, in March of 2016. Once released from the Atlas V however, each spacecraft will follow its own trajectory to Mars.

“MarCO is an experimental capability that has been added to the InSight mission, but is not needed for mission success. MarCO will fly independently to Mars,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s planetary science division in a statement.

Unlike the famed Mars rovers, InSight will be a stationary raft designed to study the interior structure of the planet. When it arrives in September of 2016, updates will be sent to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) which will forward information to Earth. However, the MRO cannot receive information in one band while transmitting in a different band which means that it could take more than an hour to transmit information on InSight’s landing.

MarCo, on the other hand, can receive in UHF and X-band frequencies and transmit in X-band simultaneously.

If this initial demonstration is successful, CubeSats could provide extra capabilities to NASA as the agency explores the solar system and they could do so at relatively little cost.

The specifications for CubeSats were originally developed by researchers at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) and Stanford University in 1999. They are now built by a number of companies and have allowed small organizations and universities access to space that would have been cost prohibitive in the past.

While many public and private organizations are working to reduce the cost of space travel, it currently costs approximately $10,000 per pound to put something in orbit, according to NASA.