Recently, NASA has been looking at CubeSats as a way of carrying out economical deep space missions. One of the first of these may be shoebox-sized satellite called the Lunar IceCube, which is designed to look for water ice and other resources on the Moon. Tentatively aimed to launch on the first Orion mission scheduled to fly by 2018, it is intended to not only uncover materials for future deep-space missions and lunar colonization, but also as a technology demonstrator for a new class of interplanetary probes.
Developed by a team led by Morehead State University (MSU) in Kentucky and including members from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the Busek Company in Massachusetts, IceCube is one of the projects in NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) program. NASA describes IceCube as a six-unit CubeSat. That is, it’s a rectangular satellite made up of six standard CubeSat units, each measuring 10 cm (4 in) on a side. It was built by MSU, which will also use its 21-m (69-ft) ground station antenna for tracking and communications during the mission.
If permission is granted, CubeSat will fly as a secondary payload on the first manned Orion mission, Exploration Mission One (EM-1). It would be installed inside the adapter connecting Orion to the upper stage of the Space Launch System (SLS) booster rocket and, once in orbit, the CubeSat would be released before a state-of-the-art RF Ion BIT-3 electric thruster built by Busek kicks in.
Once in its highly-inclined elliptical lunar orbit, IceCube would begin its six month mission, working in conjunction with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Lunar Flashlight mission, which will be looking for ice in crater shadows.
Source: NASA
Dear User/Visitor! Please, answer on our questions: tick off one of the positions – your answer will make us able to improve our site and make it more interesting and useful!