CubeSats, the miniature satellites weighing less than a bowling ball, are transforming the way we explore the cosmos. These affordable and agile spacecraft are enabling more frequent and diverse missions, accelerating the pace of space discovery. As a professor of electrical and computer engineering explains, CubeSats’ single-purpose focus and low-cost development make them a game-changer, allowing even small startups and university labs to reach beyond Earth. With CubeSats now studying exoplanets, mapping lunar water, and visiting asteroids, these tiny titans are paving the way for humanity’s multiplanetary future.
The Pocket-Sized Revolution
CubeSats are generally smaller than a bowling ball, and a few fit in the palm of your hand. Even so, the small satellites are having an oversize influence on space exploration.
Traditional satellites can run as high as hundreds of millions or even billons of dollars, keeping them out of reach for all but the biggest space agencies. CubeSats, meanwhile, only cost a fraction of the price — some less than $10,000! Pricing at this level makes it possible for smaller organizations, startups and even university labs to send a payload of their own design into space.
This saves enormous amounts of time and money, allowing us to perform missions more cheaply, much more often, with greatly reduced risk. CubeSats are also typically secondary payload carried- essentially, detrivative missions — for main rocket launches, further reducing the launch cost barrier to entry. Because the rate at which we’re finding out new things is a key part of discovering more about the universe, and testing how far we can go in space.
Science of Specialized Sats
CubeSats are different from conventional satellites that must include a wide variety of instruments; they tend to concentrate on only one scientific aim. Whether searching for exoplanets, sizing up an asteroid or tracking water on the moon, each tiny wonder will be single-purpose built.
For a variety of reasons, this focused model has several benefits. The first one is a more cohesive and efficient design, development and testing procedure, which in-turn reduces the overall costs and times needed for procuring CubeSat mission. The second is that the data gathered by these point-defense experiments can yield key understanding that was lost in the noise due to the size and versatility of general purpose satellites.
Eight months ago, a NASA Astrobiology Magazine article detailed how scientists used data from a pair of star-positioning telescopes to detect the first confirmed exoplanet in 2018 via astrometry: The ASTERIA CubeSat (deployed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2017) also happens to be the smallest space instrument ever to witness an alien world. Concentration on one task allowed ASTERIA to not only re-find the exoplanet 55 Cancri e, but also test technology for future planet-hunting missions.
Given the rapid development of CubeSat technologies, we anticipate an even wider variety of targeted missions in the future, all helping us piece together knowledge about our solar system and beyond.
One CubeSat At A Time Reaching For The Stars
It is blazingly fast progress and amounts to a massive investment in CubeSat missions not only as an innovative way to explore the universe, but also in support of the future that awaits humanity on many planets.
Future CubeSat missions, like HERA or M-Argo will go to nearby asteroids and global synoptic survey them to address the material question even further in deep space. The era of these small satellites is demonstrating that you don’t need a sizeable combustion, expensive spacecraft in order to innovate out on the edge of our world.
The expanding sphere of CubeSat technology means that its potential to be a significant part of the next stage of exploring space is only increasing. From providing high resolution maps of the lunar surface, monitoring active processes on the Sun or potentially acting as communications relays for future human missions, CubeSats could feature heavily in our attempts to realise interplanetary ambitions.
Naturally, the road will be a long one and it also requires the hard work of space scientists and engineers. But fast-forward this incredible story a few years and the landscape of space is changed forever, with CubeSat technology having advanced more in 15 years than what was possible in the preceding half-century.
