Earth to moon mission tagged posts

A rendering of the Cislunar Explorers CubeSat separating after deployment. Credit: Kyle Doyle

Cislunar Explorers, a team of Cornell University 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’s 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.

The Cislunar Explorers – cislunar means “b...