SAN FRANCISCO – The first NASA-funded small satellite for exoplanet science is continuing to gather data well beyond its expected lifetime.
The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment, known as CUTE, a six-unit cubesat equipped with a telescope to funnel data to a spectrograph, traveled to sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit in September 2021 as a secondary payload on the NASA- U.S. Geological Survey Landsat 9 Earth-observation mission.
CUTE was designed to operate in space for at least eight months. Twenty-seven months later, the satellite’s onboard instruments still are observing the dramatic atmospheric loss of “hot jupiters,” gas giants orbiting very close to bright stars.
“This atmospheric escape is incredibly fast,” said Kevin France, CUTE principal investigator at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), which assembled, tested and operates the satellite. “The materials are coming out so fast that they are dragging all the heavy elements out of the atmosphere with them.”
Based on CUTE’s success, two additional NASA-funded, LASP-led missions have adopted similar mission and instrument designs.
“CUTE’s been a great success, particularly given that we didn’t really know if we could do it for the amount of money that we proposed,” France told SpaceNews at the American Geophysical Union conference here.
Lessons learned from CUTE are helping researchers “figure out how to build small spacecraft, how to build small instruments and how to have a student-led team,” France said.
Smallsat Astronomy
The budget for developing, assembling and operating CUTE through the summer of 2024 is about $5.5 million.
“At this cost, we’re still figuring out how to make things work,” France said. “So, working and doing science is batting above your average.”
The missions mimicking CUTE are 12-unit cubesats Sprite and Mantis.
Sprite, which stands for Supernova…
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