When NASA’s InSight mission reached Mars last year, it wasn’t alone. It was accompanied by two tiny satellites called CubeSats, or in this case, MarCO, for Mars Cube One. They were the first CubeSats ever to visit the Red Planet. The pair, nicknamed EVE and WALL-E, after Pixar’s fictional robots, relayed information from InSight’s descent. But their real mission was simply to show off their abilities so far from home and prove that such small missions – the total MarCO program only cost $18.5 million – could succeed in deep space.
The satellites did their job. But now, more than two months after InSight landed, the CubeSats have gone silent as they continue drifting past Mars, and NASA doesn’t expect to hear from them again.
CubeSat missions have proven popular in Earth orbit, as their low cost and tiny launch weight means many universities can afford to perform their own ...
