#CubeSats

NASA is seeking industry and research input on CubeSat opportunities tied to Artemis III, IV, and V, signaling that small secondary payloads will remain part of the agency’s lunar exploration architecture.

Engineers in Japan have developed a 64-gram foldable antenna for CubeSats that packs into a small box and deploys in orbit to boost communications performance.

NASA’s planned Mars Telecommunications Network now includes a requirement to carry a small science payload, opening a narrow but notable research opportunity on a mission built primarily to support communications at Mars

Rocket Lab has launched eight Japanese cubeSats for JAXA, extending a stopgap partnership that emerged after setbacks to Japan’s Epsilon rocket program and giving new space technologies a path to orbit.

A cluster of ESA-supported satellites launched on Transporter-16 is testing laser links, inter-satellite networking, 5G and in-orbit AI to make orbital data transfer faster and more efficient.

Astroscale has cleared a critical design review for the Orpheus mission, a British military-backed pair of cubesats intended to track low Earth orbit objects and study space weather effects on communications and signals.

Eight CubeSats and one additional payload backed by the European Space Agency have entered orbit to demonstrate technologies aimed at improving how data is transmitted and processed in space.

NASA says a set of technology and science demonstrations will fly on SpaceX’s Transporter-16 mission, with experiments spanning space weather, magnetic-field sensing, in-space communications, logistics, and thermal-prote