There are none of the companies which is not interested in exploring the Red Planet. Now the spin-off company of Richard Branson‘s space tourism company Virgin Galactic, the Virgin Orbit has also got new plans to explore the Earth’s neighbouring planet.
Today the company announced that it has partnered with a Polish satellite company, SatRevolution, such that together these will be working on building smallsat CubeSats and send them to Mars. The company has also got around a dozen Polish universities, including AGH University of Science and Technology, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, having a vast experience in the space technology, onboard to work on the same project. Virgin Orbit also revealed that the company is trying to get its first satellite ready and send it as soon as 2022.
The company’s new mission is said to be inspired by NASA’s recent InSight mission. NASA under its InSight mission successfully sent two CubeSats (small spacecraft of the size of a cereal box) to Mars in November 2018, And now, Virgin Orbit wants to send a series of CubeSats to the Red Planet under its three robotic missions.
The company will carry out the three missions in the next decade starting from 2022. These missions will make Virgin Orbit the first private company to complete a purely commercial trip to Mars, as there are only four organisation that has successfully completed their Mars missions and that too, the government-owned ones. Even the Major player in the private space industry, SpaceX has not been able to do a similar mission till now.
So the mission might not only be to send the CubeSats to Mars, but to make Virgin Orbit the first company for bringing commercial CubeSats to the “Red Planet”.
According to the company, despite being small satellites, the CubeSats will help to dig deeper into Mars’ atmospheric conditions, its orbit as well as surface and help in researching on the planet by providing key information. The smallsats will be able to click and send in images, analyse the Mars’ atmosphere, and even look for water on and under the martian surface. The company has not given any other information but has revealed that the spacecraft can weigh around 50 KG.
The company will be operating from multiple spaceports including the Mojave Air, Space Port in California as well as Cornwall Spaceport in the U.K. The company will be making use of its LauncherOne rocket to launch the CubeSats from in between the air.
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