The Adler CubeSat initiative has been moving forward. Two mission concepts have been selected for further development. Our primary mission is to fly a cryocooled mid-infrared imager. As a backup, we're also considering an active radar to detect orbital debris. The objective of the IR mission (or ADLIRSAT) is to obtain full coverage of Earth's [...]
MarsDrop is an initiative to develop an inexpensive space probe that will land on Mars using a parawing. The parawing will allow the probe to fly significant distances through the Martian atmosphere under controlled guidance. The only way this can be tested on Earth is to drop the probe and parawing from a high-altitude balloon [...]
We attended the 1st Adler Planetarium CubeSat Development Workshop held on February 1st. The workshop kicked off a program at the planetarium to build and fly an open-sourced collaboratively built CubeSat under NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative. The intention is to submit a proposal to NASA's Educational Launch of Nanosatellite (ELaNA) Mission, which provides flight [...]