The first NASA-funded small satellite for exoplanet exploration continues to collect data well beyond its expected lifetime.
The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment, known as CUTE, is a six-unit cube satellite equipped with a telescope to transmit data to a spectrograph. It launched into sun-synchronous Earth orbit in September 2021 as a support payload on NASA’s Landsat and the U.S. Geological Survey. 9 Earth Observation Mission.
CUTE was designed to operate in space for at least eight months. Twenty-seven months later, the satellite’s onboard instruments still observe the dramatic loss of atmosphere of “hot Jupiters,” gas giants orbiting very close to bright stars.
Due to CUTE’s success, two additional LASP-led missions funded by NASA have adopted similar mission and instrument designs.
France said lessons learned from CUTE are helping researchers “figure out how to build small spacecraft, small instruments, and how to have a student-led team. “
Astronomy of a small satellite
The budget for developing, assembling, and operating CUTE until the summer of 2024 is about $5.5 million.
The missions that simulate CUTE are the 12-unit Sprite and Mantis cubesats.
Sprite, which stands for Proxies for Reionization and Integrated Testbed Experiment, is scheduled for 2024. The $4 million mission will study how gas and dust are processed in galaxies and how energetic ionizing radiation is transported from stars to the intergalactic medium between galaxies.
Mantis, short for Monitoring Activity from Nearby Stars with UV Imaging and Spectroscopy, is an $8.5 million campaign to observe how high-energy radiation from stars affects planets’ habitability.
Ingenuity and Chance
Thanks to ingenuity and luck, CUTE continues to operate more than two years after its launch.
The tiny satellite was sent into orbit at a higher altitude than the mission planners expected. As a result, CUTE is expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere in 2027 rather than at the end of this year as initially planned.
Additional time in orbit means extra wear and tear on the hardware.
“Every time we have a problem, we find a new way to control the spacecraft,” said France.
For example, mission operators learned to communicate directly with the CUTE science payload when the satellite’s primary and backup memory cards failed.
Distant galaxies
Cubesats have been widely used for civil and commercial space missions since LASP researchers proposed CUTE in 2016.
At the time, “we started to believe that we could explore the Sun and Earth’s upper atmosphere with CubeSats,” said France. “But the idea that we could point at targets 300-400 light years away and make high-precision astronomical measurements with a Cubesat was ambitious.” Now that CUTE has demonstrated the potential, small satellites could play a key role in observing distant galaxies, black holes “and anything else we’re interested in studying.”