STEM educationCornell students hope to make the first CubeSat to orbit the moon

Published 20 September 2016

Cislunar Explorers, a team of Cornell graduate and undergraduate students guided by Mason Peck, a former senior official at NASA, is attempting to boldly go where no CubeSat team has gone before: around the moon. The group attempting to make a first-ever moon orbit with a satellite no bigger than a cereal box, made entirely with off-the-shelf materials, and which uses water as a propellant. The Cislunar Explorers take part in NASA’s Cube Quest Challenge, which is offering a total of $5.5 million to teams that meet the challenge objectives: designing, building, and delivering flight-worthy, small satellites capable of advanced operations near and beyond the moon.

A satellite propelled by the Earth’s most abundant natural resource? Yes, it is true.

Cislunar Explorers, a team of Cornell graduate and undergraduate students guided by Mason Peck, a former senior official at NASA and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is attempting to boldly go where no CubeSat team has gone before: around the moon.

Not only is Peck’s group attempting to make a first-ever moon orbit with a satellite no bigger than a cereal box, made entirely with off-the-shelf materials, it is doing so with propellant that you can obtain simply by turning on a faucet.

“This has a very important goal, and that is to demonstrate that you can use water as a propellant,” said Peck, who served as NASA’s chief technologist in 2012-13.

Cornell notes that the Cislunar Explorers — cislunar means “between the Earth and the moon” — are in phase 3 of the four-phase Ground Tournament portion of the Cube Quest Challenge, sponsored by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate Centennial Challenge Program.

The challenge is offering a total of $5.5 million to teams that meet the challenge objectives: designing, building, and delivering flight-worthy, small satellites capable of advanced operations near and beyond the moon.

So far, Cornell’s group has two top-three finishes, including a first-place finish in Ground Tournament 2 in the spring. Both finishes earned them cash prizes — $20,000 for GT-1, $30,000 for GT-2, all reinvested into the project — as well as the ability to continue in the competition.

The top three finishers will earn a ride on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket in early 2018, to compete in either the Deep Space Derby or the Lunar Derby. Cornell’s team will compete in the latter, which focuses on propulsion for small spacecraft and near-Earth communications.

And while winning the competition is the team’s main objective, it is not the only one, Peck said.

“Of course, we’d like to be the first CubeSat to orbit the moon,” he said, “but even if we don’t, if we can successfully demonstrate that water is all you need to travel in space, we’ve gone a long way toward achieving some important goals.”

Going “massless”
Among them: Proving the ability to use resources available in space and ending our reliance on Earth-bound technologies to explore space further. “Massless” space exploration has been a goal of Peck’s for years.