Most CubeSats weigh less than a bowling ball, and some are small enough to hold in your hand. But the impact these instruments have on space exploration is enormous. CubeSats - miniature, agile and cheap satellites - are revolutionizing the way scientists study the cosmos.
A standard-sized CubeSat is small, about 4 pounds (about 2 kilograms). Some are larger, perhaps four times the standard size, but others are as little as a pound.
As a professor of electrical and computer engineering who works with new space technologies, I can tell you that CubeSats are an easier and much cheaper way to reach other worlds.
Rather than carrying many instruments with a wide range of purposes, these Lilliputian-sized satellites typically focus on a single, specific scientific goal: whether it's discovering exoplanets or measuring the size of an asteroid . They are affordable throughout the space community, even for small start-ups, private companies and university laboratories.
Small satellites, big benefits
The advantages of CubeSats over larger satellites are significant. CubeSats are cheaper to develop and test. The savings in time and money means more frequent and diverse missions and 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; they become part of the payload of a larger spacecraft. They are put into containers and ejected into space by a spring mechanism attached to their dispensers. Once in the room they are switched on. CubeSats usually end their missions by burning up as they enter the atmosphere after their orbits have slowly decayed.
For example, a team of students from Brown University built a CubeSat in less than 18 months for less than $10,000. The satellite, about the size of a loaf of bread and developed to study the growing problem of space debris, was deployed from a SpaceX rocket in May 2022.
Smaller size, single purpose
Sending a satellite into space is of course nothing new. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into orbit in 1957. Today there are about 10,000 active satellites in operation, and almost all of them are involved in communications, navigation, military defense, technical development or earth studies. Only a few - less than 3% - explore space.
That is now changing. Large and small satellites are quickly becoming the backbone of space research. These spacecraft can now travel long distances to study planets and stars, places where human exploration or robot landings would be expensive, risky or simply impossible with current technology.
But the costs of building and launching traditional satellites are significant. NASA's lunar exploration orbiter, launched in 2009, is about the size of a minibus and costs nearly $600 million. The Mars exploration orbital, with a wingspan as long as a school bus, cost more than $700 million. The European Space Agency's solar orbiter, a 1,800-kilogram probe designed to study the sun, cost $1.5 billion. And the Europa Clipper - as long as a basketball court and scheduled to launch to Jupiter's moon Europa in October 2024 - will ultimately cost $5 billion.
These satellites, relatively large and staggeringly complex, are vulnerable to potential failures, which is not uncommon. In an instant, years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars can be lost in space.
Exploring the moon, Mars and the Milky Way
Because they are so small, CubeSats can be released in large numbers in a single launch, further reducing costs. By deploying them in batches - also called constellations - multiple devices can observe the same phenomena.
For example, as part of the Artemis I mission in November 2022, NASA launched 10 CubeSats. The satellites are now trying to detect and map water on the moon. These findings are crucial not only for the upcoming Artemis missions, but also for the search for a permanent human presence on the lunar surface. The CubeSats cost $13 million.
The MarCO CubeSats - two 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 took pictures of the planet with wide-angle cameras. They cost about $20 million.
CubeSats have also studied nearby stars and exoplanets, worlds outside the solar system. In 2017, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory deployed ASTERIA, a CubeSat that observed 55 Cancri e, also known as Janssen, an exoplanet eight times larger than Earth and orbiting a star 41 light-years away. By reconfirming the existence of that distant world, ASTERIA became the smallest space instrument to ever detect an exoplanet.
Two more notable CubeSat space missions are in the pipeline: HERA, scheduled for launch in October 2024, will deploy the European Space Agency's first on-orbit CubeSats to visit the Didymos asteroid system, which lies between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt rotates.
And the M-Argo satellite, scheduled to launch in 2025, will study the shape, mass and surface minerals of a soon-to-be-named asteroid. The M-Argo is the size of a suitcase and will be the smallest CubeSat to carry out its own independent mission in interplanetary space.
The rapid progress and substantial investments already made in CubeSat missions could help make humans a multiplanetary species. But that journey will be long - and depends on the next generation of scientists to make this dream a reality.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and trusted analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Mustafa Aksoy, University at Albany, State University of New York Read more: Mustafa Aksoy works for the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY) and the Research Foundation for SUNY. He receives funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
