MT6

Exploration of planetary environments with cubesats and nanosats
Convener: Brook Lakew  | Co-Conveners: Nicolas André , Boris Segret , Stas Barabash , Julie Castillo 
Oral Program
 / Fri, 02 Oct, 14:00–15:30  / Room Venus
Poster Program
 / Attendance Thu, 01 Oct, 17:45–19:15  / Poster Area

The CubeSat concept is evolving rapidly with a broad diversity of academic and industrial partners. Whereas planetary spacecraft traditionally tend to be large missions implemented by space agencies, the potential of Cubesats for studying planetary environments from Earth’s orbit or beyond could enable a new class of low-cost missions in the next decades. This session intends to initiate and discuss the technology required to be developed to enable planetary exploration with Cubesats, possible mission concepts and science cases particularly amenable to investigation of planetary environments via Cubsats., as well as recent advances in miniaturized planetary instrumentation suitable for planetary Cubesats. Instrument concepts proposed to fly on upcoming missions; new concepts yet to be proposed; other subsystems (propulsion; power generation; communication and electronics) that fit in a 9U or less form factor (ESA CubeSat mission concepts, NASA/SIMPLEx CubeSat missions for EM1 or ISS launch, Europa Clipper mission CubeSat payloads, Mars InSight mission ..etc.)