NASA social media participant Bryan Branly takes a photograph of the Mars Cube One (MarCO) model before the Mars InSight pre-landing briefing, Sunday, Nov. 25, 2018, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is the first Mars lander of its kind, designed to study the “inner space” of Mars: its crust, mantle and core. InSight is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet at approximately 3 p.m. EST on Nov. 26.
MarCO is another first. Launched on May 5, 2018, and riding along with InSight were the two MarCO CubeSats — the first of this kind of spacecraft to fly to deep space. If this flyby demonstration is successful, the technology onboard MarCO will provide NASA with the ability to quickly transmit status information about InSight as it lands on Mars.
CubeSats are a class of spacecraft based on a standardized small size and modular use of off-the-shelf technologies. The basic CubeSat unit is a box roughly 4 inches (10 centimeters) square. Larger ones are multiples of that unit. MarCO’s design is a six-unit CubeSat about the size of a briefcase.
Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls