MarCO @ Nanosats Database

Name	MarCO
Type	CubeSat
Units or mass	6U
Organisation	NASA
Institution	Space agency
Entity	Government (Civil / Military)
Nation	US
Launch brokerer	Tyvak
Costs	$18,500,000 for two spacecraft and all project costs
Oneliner	First interplanetary CubeSat and relay data during Insight landing on Mars.
Description	Serve as a relay satellite to send data back to Earth during InSight's entry, descent and landing operations at Mars MarCO is a technology capability demonstration of communications relay system.
Results	MarCO-A Radio Occultation did not detect the Mars atmosphere or ionosphere during the flyby. An assessment of the MarCO flyby and RO data indicates that the MarCO 2-way data has a stable frequency residual and performance is in the same order of MRO 2-way data. Modeling results suggest that the 2-way MarCO radio signal could have been able to have a positive detection of the atmosphere and ionosphere comparable to MRO. Frequency residual measurements derived from MarCO X-band radio links confirm that the 1-way X-band data could have detected the neutral atmosphere but not the ionosphere.
Sources	[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Photo Sources	[1] [2] [3]
Keywords	Reflectarray, Beyond Earth orbit, Propulsion, Steerable Solar Arrays
Space photos	Link

Related Spacecraft

Name	Status	Launch	Orbit
MarCO 1 (Mars Cube One, WALL-E, MarCO-A)	Was operational until 2018-12-29 (Public news)	2018-05-05	Mars flyby
MarCO 2 (Mars Cube One, EVE, MarCO-B)	Was operational until 2019-01-04 (Public news)	2018-05-05	Mars flyby