By Mustafa Aksoy, University at Albany, State University of New York
Most CubeSats weigh less than a bowling ball, and some are small enough to hold in your hand. But the impact these instruments are having on space exploration is gigantic.
CubeSats — miniature, agile and relatively inexpensive satellites — are changing how scientists study the cosmos.
A standard-size CubeSat is tiny, weighing about 4 pounds, or roughly 2 kilograms. Some are larger, perhaps four times the standard size, while others weigh no more than a pound.
As a professor of electrical and computer engineering who works with new space technologies, I can tell you that CubeSats are a simpler and far less costly way to reach other worlds.
Rather than carrying many instruments with a vast array of purposes, these small satellites typically focus on a single, specific scientific goal — whether discovering exoplanets or measuring the size of an asteroid. They are affordable across the space community, including for small startups, private companies and university laboratories.
Tiny Satellites, Big Advantages
CubeSats have significant advantages over larger satellites. They are cheaper to develop and test, and the savings in time and money allow for more frequent and diverse missions with less risk. That alone increases the pace of discovery and space exploration.
CubeSats do not travel under their own power. Instead, they hitch a ride as part of the payload of a larger spacecraft. Packed into containers, they are ejected into space by a spring mechanism attached to their dispensers. Once in space, they power on and begin their missions.
CubeSats usually conclude their missions by burning up as they enter the atmosphere after their orbits slowly decay.
One example comes from a team of students at Brown University, who built a CubeSat in under 18 months for less than $10,000. The satellite, about the size of a loaf of bread, was developed to study the growing problem of space debris and was deployed from a SpaceX rocket in May 2022.
A CubeSat can go from whiteboard to space in less than a year.
Smaller Size, Single Purpose
Sending satellites into space is nothing new. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit in 1957. Today, about 10,000 active satellites are in orbit, with most engaged in communications, navigation, military defense, technology development or Earth observation.
Only a few — less than 3% — are exploring space.
That is beginning to change.
Satellites large and small are rapidly becoming the backbone of space research. These spacecraft can travel long distances to study planets and stars, reaching places where human exploration or robotic landings are costly, risky or impossible with current technology.
But traditional satellites are expensive to build and launch. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2009, is roughly the size of a minivan and cost close to $600 million. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, with a wingspan about the length of a school bus, cost more than $700 million. The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, a 4,000-pound probe designed to study the Sun, cost $1.5 billion.
The Europa Clipper — about the length of a basketball court and scheduled to launch in October 2024 to study Jupiter’s moon Europa — will ultimately cost $5 billion.
These large, complex satellites are vulnerable to potential failures, which are not uncommon. In the blink of an eye, years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars can be lost in space.
Exploring the Moon, Mars and the Milky Way
Because CubeSats are so small, they can be released in large numbers during a single launch, further reducing costs. Deploying them in batches, known as constellations, means multiple devices can observe the same phenomena.
As part of the Artemis I mission in November 2022, NASA launched 10 CubeSats. The satellites were designed to help detect and map water on the Moon. These findings are crucial not only for upcoming Artemis missions, but also for the long-term goal of sustaining a permanent human presence on the lunar surface. The CubeSats cost $13 million.
The MarCO CubeSats — a pair of them — accompanied NASA’s InSight lander to Mars in 2018. They served as a real-time communications relay back to Earth during InSight’s entry, descent and landing on the Martian surface. As a bonus, they captured images of Mars with wide-angle cameras. They cost about $20 million.
CubeSats have also studied nearby stars and exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system. In 2017, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory deployed ASTERIA, a CubeSat that observed 55 Cancri e, also known as Janssen. This exoplanet is eight times larger than Earth and orbits a star 41 light-years away. By reconfirming the existence of that distant world, ASTERIA became the smallest space instrument ever to detect an exoplanet.
Future CubeSat Missions
Two more notable CubeSat space missions are on the way.
HERA, scheduled to launch in October 2024, will deploy the European Space Agency’s first deep-space CubeSats to visit the Didymos asteroid system, which orbits between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt.
M-Argo, with a launch planned for 2025, will study the shape, mass and surface minerals of a soon-to-be-named asteroid. About the size of a suitcase, M-Argo will be the smallest CubeSat to perform its own independent mission in interplanetary space.
The swift progress and substantial investments already made in CubeSat missions could help make humans a multiplanetary species. But that journey will be a long one — and it depends on the next generation of scientists to develop this dream.
Mustafa Aksoy is an Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University at Albany, State University of New York.
Editor’s Note: This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
