Something for kids to get excited about

CubeSats in Mars orbit (artist illustration) - NASA

There was great jubilation on Monday as NASA’s latest mission to Mars, the Insight lander, successfully touched down. This $828 million mission is nearly parsimonious when compared to the $150 billion cost of the International Space Station. And it is hoped to answer a deeply existential question – what happened to Mars’s oceans and atmosphere?

Some researchers believe that, long ago, Mars was potentially able to support life with liquid water and a relatively thick atmosphere. But its lack of a strong magnetosphere, such as Earth possesses, allowed the solar wind to eventually sweep away much of the atmosphere thereby allowing the oceans to evaporate into space. Insight will perform seismic studies to allow us to understand the dynamics of Mars’s core and perhaps the cause of her fate.

But in all the excitement, short thrift was given to another remarkable achievement. Insight did not fly alone, but was accompanied by a pair of diminutive, briefcase-size companions flying in formation with her. Two identical miniature spacecraft, each about 30 pounds, detached from Insight once underway and accompanied her across deep space, then went into orbit around Mars as Insight landed. Named MarCO-A and MarCO-B, Jet Propulsion Lab engineers whimsically nicknamed them WALL-E and EVE after the animated characters in the 2008 film WALL-E.

MarCO-A and -B are communication satellites and relay data between Insight and Earth. They were the first to report Insight’s successful landing. More importantly, they have proven that CubeSats (which they are) are capable of withstanding the rigors of a 300-million mile journey through deep space and arrive with pinpoint accuracy. 

A CubeSat is a standardized miniature satellite whose specifications were established in 1999 by California Polytechnic University and Stanford University. Since then over 800 CubeSats have been launched into low Earth orbit to perform a wide variety of purposes. One of the key differentiators of CubeSats is that they are hitchhikers and don’t have their own primary launch vehicle. This is the major contributor to their low cost.

CubeSats have been designed and deployed by a variety of commercial, governmental, and academic establishments, including universities, high schools, and even middle schools. That last bit is incredibly important.

Robertsville Middle School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, recently was notified by NASA that their student proposal to loft a CubeSat into orbit had been approved. The photos of exuberant girls and boys are enough to warm the heart of any STEM teacher. RamSat (so named because the school mascot is a ram) will launch as soon as next year and will use imaging data to determine forest coverage lost to wildfires.

Peter Thornton, a scientist from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, says it well.

“This is such an exciting opportunity for the students. They will now have the chance to design, build, carry out and own a satellite mission. They will be the mission scientists, the communication specialists, and the logistics experts. They will calculate orbits, learn to aim their satellite camera at selected targets on the ground, radio their commands to RamSat, and receive and interpret the digital data streams broadcast by RamSat, containing imagery and all the other important data gathered on-board.

“They’ll be working as a team to identify and solve problems, and they will be working with NASA professionals to integrate RamSat into the launch and deployment mission,” Thornton said. “I can’t think of a more exciting project to ignite the students’ curiosity and passion for science and engineering.”

It is very likely that the girls and boys working on this project will be able to answer the age-old question of first year Algebra students: “When will I ever use this stuff in real life?”

Robertsville Middle kids will be living it. Maybe Wamsutta will be next?