I am a little bit fascinated by the MarCO A/B cubesats that were part of the Insight data relay. So, I have questions :).
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Was the attitude control only based on the small gas thrusters, or did it have some reaction-wheel control too? If so, is that an off-the-shelf thing you can buy for cubesats, or was it bespoke?
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Wikipedia says: "MarCO-B has been leaking propellant gas almost since liftoff", but the rate of leak was low and the mission was completed nonetheless. Did that leak show up in detectable differences in the trajectory of MarCO-B over the cruise phase? Did it have to be compensated for with propellant? Is the cause known?
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For the high-gain relay, wikipedia says 8 kbits/sec. That's a lot! I guess it must be a narrow-ish beam then? How can the MarCOs have a narrow beam channel to earth and the Insight lander at once, if (?) the only way to point the antenna is by turning the whole MarCO? Are there two antennas, or do they rotate the MarCOs around, or what?
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Since these are cheap, will we see a near future where universities and even private entities might engage in planetary flybys on their own? I suppose you'd need to ride-share with a bigger mission going that way, but even so...
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A small and cheap cubesat could not land on Mars (well, it could crash :D) ... I was thinking if it could land on something small like an asteroid without much gravity, but then I thought you would always be extremely limited in dV in such a small craft, so it'd be impossible to rendezvous. Is there any realistic hope for a cubesat to do ever anything but a flyby, like get itself into orbit around something small?
Oh, and congrats to everyone involved with Insight, if any are reading! It's super great! Humanity at its finest, when we too often see our worst.
Submitted December 18, 2018 at 12:05PM by NoGreenMachine https://ift.tt/2R1IDkZ
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