The first NASA-funded small satellite for exoplanet exploration continues to collect data well beyond its expected lifetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Due to CUTE’s success, two additional LASP-led missions funded by NASA have adopted similar mission and instrument designs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. “<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The budget for developing, assembling, and operating CUTE until the summer of 2024 is about $5.5 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The missions that simulate CUTE are the 12-unit Sprite and Mantis cubesats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thanks to ingenuity and luck, CUTE continues to operate more than two years after its launch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Additional time in orbit means extra wear and tear on the hardware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEvery time we have a problem, we find a new way to control the spacecraft,\u201d said France.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, mission operators learned to communicate directly with the CUTE science payload when the satellite’s primary and backup memory cards failed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cubesats have been widely used for civil and commercial space missions since LASP researchers proposed CUTE in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first NASA-funded small satellite for exoplanet exploration continues to collect data well beyond its expected lifetime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":218,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6,36,3,14,122],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting","tag-nasa","tag-suputnyky","tag-nauka","tag-kosmos","tag-cute"],"yoast_head":"\n