Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
When the ESA’s Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) launches in late 2020, it will be carrying the first European-built CubeSats ever designed to travel beyond Earth’s orbit and into deep space, the agency announced on Thursday.
CubeSats are among the smallest types of probes currently being used internationally, and are formed in standard cubic units of 10 centimeters (3.9 inches) per side. They also typically have a mass of no more than 1.33 kilograms and are built using off-the-shelf components. They are literally small, cube satellites that can fit in the palm of your hand.
Typically, they are made to provide smaller companies with a more affordable way to put a satellite into orbit, but thanks to the ESA General Studies Program’s SysNova initiative, teams can submit ideas for CubeSats that will travel beyond Earth’s orbit and into deep space.
Intergalactic contest
“AIM has room for a total of six CubeSat units,” explained ESA mission manager Ian Carnelli. “So potentially that might mean six different one-unit CubeSats could fly, but in practice it might turn out that two three-unit CubeSats will be needed to produce meaningful scientific return.”
“We’re looking for innovative ideas for CubeSat-hosted sensors that will boost and complement AIM’s own scientific return,” he added. “We also intend to use these CubeSats, together with AIM itself and its asteroid lander, to test out intersatellite communications networking.”
According to the agency, the contest will be looking for small probes that provide “innovative solutions to space mission challenges.” Qualifying teams can submit their proposals, which are to include the concepts of the missions and how they plan to address defined technical issues associates with operating such small spacecraft in close proximity to an asteroid.
Selected submissions will be funded by the ESA for additional study over the next seven months, after which time there will be a final review of all projects at the ESTEC technical center in the Netherlands. Winners will collaborate with the agency to further explore and elaborate upon their designs, which will include working at ESTEC’s Concurrent Design Facility.
“ESA’s SysNova initiative will be applied to survey a comparatively large number of alternative solutions, this competition framework giving industry and universities the opportunity to work together on developing their scientific investigations in a field that is the technological cutting edge,” said Carnelli.
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The Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is currently scheduled to launch in October 2020, and will mark the first time that a spacecraft will be sent to a binary system – the Didymos asteroids, an 800-meter main object that is orbited by a 170-meter moon, which will travel to within 11 million kilometers of Earth in 2022.
Preliminary design work on the AIM spacecraft is scheduled to start next month, and during its primary operations, it will perform high-resolution visual, thermal and radar mapping of the moon. AIM will also send down a lander, marking the first time that the ESA will have done so since the Rosetta mission’s Philae lander touched down on a comet last November.
The mission will also serve as the ESA’s contribution to the larger, international Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) project. A NASA-led probe, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), will impact the smaller of the Didymos asteroids, while AIM will perform detailed before-and-after mapping, most notably looking for any shift in the asteroid’s orbit.
“While it will return invaluable science, AIM is conceived as a technology demonstration mission, testing out various technologies and techniques needed for deep space expeditions in future,” Carnelli said. “These include two-way high-bandwidth optical communications – with data being returned via laser beam to ESA’s station in Tenerife – as well as intersatellite links in deep space and low-gravity lander operations.”
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“Once demonstrated, these capabilities will be available to future deep-space endeavors, such as Lagrange-point observatories returning large amounts of data and sample return missions to Phobos – and ultimately Mars – as well as crewed missions far beyond Earth orbit,” he added.
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