CubeSat Moon mission to test new Ion Drive

Mini-sats to buzz Luna and snap its sunny shores in 2018

NASA and Lockheed Martin have finalised the contract for an upcoming CubeSat mission called SkyFire.

The contractor was first named back in February; with the deal done, construction kicks off for the six-unit box that will, if all goes well, accompany the Orion EM-1 (exploration mission 1) to the moon in 2018.

During its lunary flyby, SkyFire will take high-resolution infrared images of features like solar illumination areas. Its small size will, Lockheed Martin reckons, give it high manoeuvrability.

It's also going to be a test platform for a propulsion system called “electrospray” – a scaled-down low-power ion drive using electrically-charged droplets accelerated past a static electrical field.

SkyFire is one of two deep-space CubeSats proposed for the EM-1 expedition; the other was from Moorehead University, the Lunar IceCube.

Even before it gets to space, SkyFire will have an unpleasant life, if NASA's announcement about its just-completed Dellingr CubeSat is anything to go by.

Dellingr (named for the Norse god of dawn) is about to enter its environmental test phase – that is, it's going into the oven. And the freezer. While it gets shaken around to make sure it's not going to fall to pieces.

As NASA more prosaically puts it: “to make sure it can withstand intense vibrations, the extremes of hot and cold, and even the magnetic fields of space”.

The six-unit (meaning its volume is around six litres) CubeSat packs in three payloads: a mass spectrometer, and two “no-boom” magnetometers (that is, they're deployed within the satellite rather than on booms). The kit will be collecting data to create a chemical and electromagnetic profile of the outer atmosphere – presuming the box survives NASA's cruel-to-be-kind preflight. ®