NASA has achieved a first for the class of tiny spacecraft known as CubeSats, which are opening new access to space. Over the past week, two CubeSats called MarCO-A and MarCO-B have been firing their propulsion systems to guide themselves toward Mars. This process, called a trajectory correction maneuver, allows a spacecraft to refine its…
Even Small Spacecraft Can Dream Big
Many of NASA’s most iconic spacecraft towered over the engineers who built them: think Voyagers 1 and 2, Cassini, or Galileo — all large machines that could measure up to a school bus. But in the past two decades, mini-satellites called CubeSats have made space accessible to a new generation. These briefcase-sized boxes are more…
Astronaut Track their Health in Space with 3-D Printable Tools
If humans are destined for deep space, they need to understand the space environment changes health, including aging and antibiotic resistance. A new NASA project could help. It aims to develop technology used to study “omics” — fields of microbiology that are important to human health. Omics includes research into genomes, microbiomes, and proteomes. The…