ON ITS WAY TO MARS, WHY NOT SNAP A PIC OF EARTH
On May 5, NASA's InSight Mars mission took a leap towards space, but it was not the only equipment that began its journey to the red planet.
The agency also sent two small cubesats along with InSight, and one of them snapped its first photo. It is a long way from getting any snapshots of Mars, so NASA pointed the camera back at Earth and got a nice "pale blue dot" homage.
InSight is a lander that will drop down to Mars and examine the planet's interior, by taking seismic readings. That is a first for scientists studying Mars. The Two Mars Cube One (or just MarCO) satellites will swing by the planet to act as communication platforms for InSight.
These are considered experimental satellites, so the mission InSight won't be affected if they do not perform as intended.
The MarCO satellites are travelling separately from the InSight, even though they launched abroad the same rocket. Since they are cubesats, each one fits inside a standard frame, measuring 36.6 x 24.3 x 11.8 centimetres. They are about the size of a briefcase before the antenna and solar panels deploy.
As you can guess, the goal of these cuesats is not to snap photos, but they do have cameras. NASA pinged MarCO-B on May 9, in order to make sure its high-gain antenna deployed correctly. The satellite got the signal, took a photo, and sent it back to Earth.
The image shows the properly deployed antenna at the edge and Earth off in the distance. If you look closely, you can actually see the moon as well. The chief engineer of MarCO, Andy Klesh, called the image a "homage to Voyager". He is, of course, referring to the famous pale blue dot photo taken by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990 at the request of scientist Carl Sagan.
The Voyager looked back at Earth from a distance of 6 billion kilometres, but the MarCO-B was much closer to home just 1 million kilometres.
The plan is to have the MarCO perform a flyby of Mars on November 26. That is when InSight will begin it descent to the planet's surface. By relaying data from InSight, the team hopes to show that small cubesats can be useful in deep space missions.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be communicating with InSight as well in case MarCO doesn’t work out. After the flyby, NASA will conduct a long-distance health check on the satellites, and then the mission will be over. This may only be the beginning of cubesat use in deep space missions, though.