Virgin Orbit satellites could be on Mars from 2022

NASA's InSight mission caught the attention of everyone, but especially one particular person: Richard Branson. What is special about him is a company that, together with Space X, has commercial ambitions for Mars. InSight inspired the Virgin Orbit team to plan to send at least three missions to the red planet over the next decade from 2022.

For the venture, Virgin Orbit brought a dozen universities and one satellite maker (SatRevolution), all Polish, on board. As a goal, become the first trading company to send a device into deep space. The honor of being first was from NASA, with the two cubesats Wall-E and Eve, which traveled with the InSight spacecraft to Mars. Upon reaching the planet, InSight descended to the Martian surface, while the two satellites relayed the probe signals back to Earth.

So far, only government agencies have reached Mars. "This is still a very small club, and there is no consortium of companies and universities, " Virgin Orbit VP of Special Projects, Will Pomerantz, told The Verge .

Wall-E and Eve, the pair of cubesats launched during NASA's Insight mission, inspired Virgin Orbit to plan its own mission to Mars. (Source: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Press Release)

The idea is to design devices up to 50kg and send them into deep space aboard the LauncherOne rocket, designed to launch not from the ground but under the wing of an aircraft (in this case, the Virgin Orbit Boeing 747, called Cosmic Girl). Ambition for space seems to have no limits.

Goal goes beyond Mars

“We spent some time looking at our options and found that we can send devices to places like the Moon and Mars, and even the moons of Venus - who knows, maybe we can reach some of the asteroids in the Mars-Jupiter belt, ” says Pomerantz. .

As part of the deal, Virgin Orbit will build the rocket and SatRevolution the satellites. As for Polish universities, they will determine mission guidelines, such as capturing images of Mars and its moons and studying the Martian atmosphere.

Virgin Orbit satellites could be on Mars from 2022 via TecMundo