The full-scale mock-up of NASA's MarCO CubeSat held by Farah Alibay, a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is dwarfed by the one-half-scale model of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter behind her.

As NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory prepares its first two interplanetary cubesat spacecraft for launch next year, engineers are examining what other solar system missions such spacecraft could perform and the key technologies needed to enable them.

This post is only available to members.

Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...