PARIS - ESA is offering CubeSats a ride to a pair of asteroids in deep space. Teams of researchers and companies from any ESA Member State are free to compete. The selected CubeSats will become Europe's first to travel beyond Earth orbit once the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is launched in October 2020.
"AIM has room for a total of six CubeSat units," explains Ian Carnelli, managing the mission for ESA. "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."
Carnelli adds that ESA is looking for CubeSat sensors that will boost and complement AIM's scientific return. The CubeSats will also be used, along with AIM itself, to test intersatellite communications networking technologies and techniques.
Beginning its preliminary Phase-A/B design work next month, ESA's AIM spacecraft will be humanity's first mission to a binary system - the paired Didymos asteroids, which come a comparatively close 11 million km to Earth in 2022. The 800 m-diameter main body is orbited by a 170 m moon.
AIM will perform high-resolution visual, thermal and radar mapping of the moon. It will also put down a lander - ESA's first touchdown on a small body since Rosetta's Philae landed on a comet last November.
AIM also represents ESA's contribution to a larger international effort, the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission.
The NASA-led Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) probe will impact the smaller body, while AIM will perform detailed before-and-after mapping, including pinpointing any shift in the asteroid's orbit.
CubeSats are part of a growing area of interest in the satellite industry. The reduction in size of computer components is allowing governments and companies to build much smaller satellites than they have in the past. The small size can reduce costs significantly. These reduced costs are allowing more organizations to get involved in building and operating satellites and enabling other organizations to cheaply expand the scope of larger, more expensive missions.
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