A Big Milestone for CubeSats

NASA JPL just made public that on May 8, 2018 the first interplanetary CubeSats called Mars Cube One (MarCO) reached 621,371 miles (1 million kilometers) from Earth. “CubeSats have never gone this far into space before, so it’s a big milestone. Both our CubeSats are healthy and functioning properly. We’re looking forward to seeing them travel even farther,” said Andy Klesh, MarCO’s chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that built the CubeSats and leads the MarCO mission. And One of the CubeSats, called MarCO-B (and affectionately known as “Wall-E” to the MarCO team) used a fisheye camera to snap its first photo on May 9 to confirm the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna has properly unfolded. From A Pale Blue Dot, As Seen by a CubeSat (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7124)