"CubeSats have never gone this far into space before, so it's a big milestone. The atmosphere of Mars is only one percent that of Earth, so when our helicopter is on the Martian surface, it's already at the Earth equivalent of 100,000 feet up", said Mimi Aung, Mars Helicopter project manager at JPL.
The first image captured by one of NASA's Mars Cube One (MarCO) CubeSats.
"Consider it our homage to Voyager", said Andy Klesh, MarCO's chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We're looking forward to seeing them travel even farther".
The Mars Helicopter, an unmanned rotorcraft, will travel with the agency's Mars 2020 rover mission, now scheduled to launch in July 2020, to demonstrate the viability and potential of heavier-than-air vehicles on the Red Planet.
The MarCO craft will undergo a long-distance health check within a few weeks of the Mars flyby, and then the mission will be over, team members have said.
Last week, the MarCO-B spacecraft (also known as Wall-E) snapped a picture with its wide-field color camera to check the deployment of its high-gain antenna. "Both our Cubesats are healthy and functioning properly". If all goes as planned, the tiny satellites will relay radio data to Earth detailing InSight's descent and landing on Mars.
NASA scientists weren't doing this for sport, but to see if the cubesat's antenna had unfolded - and worked.
The MarCO-B CubeSat saw Earth and the moon from over 600,000 miles away. Although many know that it lifted off successfully, they didn't know that the spacecraft wasn't alone on its journey but that it was joined by two tiny CubeSats of which one has returned a magnificent photograph of an Earth-Moon duo. However, Mars Cube One is the first CubeSat created to operate in deep space.
The MarCo satellites and the InSight Mars lander are expected to reach the Red Planet on November 26. The space agency announced on Friday, May 11, 2018 that their next robotic mission to the Red Planet will carry a helicopter. The lander - whose name is short for "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport" - will perform three different experiments to investigate Mars' internal structure and composition over its roughly two-Earth-year prime mission. The space agency also launched two CubeSats, briefcase-size mini-satellites. After this successful first image transmission, the twin satellites will attempt their first trajectory correction maneuvers later this month, NASA reported.