# An Overview of CubeSat Missions and Applications
## 7 CubeSats as Deep-Space Exploration Platforms
### CubeSats as Asteroid Exploration Probes  
In recent years, the utilization of CubeSat platforms in asteroid exploration missions has commenced, leading to the development and execution of a variety of missions. The first and up to this day only CubeSat mission to successfully perform an asteroid fly-by was the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube). LICIACube was a 6U CubeSat developed by the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) as a part of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which aimed to demonstrate the asteroid deflection concept by changing an asteroid's motion in space through kinetic impact. The target of said mission was the 65803 Didymos binary system which contains the Didymosasteroid and its moon, Dimorphos. For this mission, the LICIACube was carried onboard the main DART probe (see Figure 21a) and was deployed ten days prior to DART's impact on the Dimorphos asteroid, under the mission of acquiring images that would help the scientific community to study and better understand the effects of the DART kinetic impact vehicle on the asteroid. For this mission, LICIACube was equipped with two cameras, a narrow field of view camera and a wide field of view Gecko imager (Dragonfly Aerospace, Stellenbosch, South Africa) with an RGB Bayer pattern filter which was developed by SCS space (Stellenbosch, South Africa). The LICIACube was successful in performing its planned mission, and on 26 September 2022, flew by Dimorphos at a distance of approximately 58 km, managing to capture several images of the asteroid both before and after DART's impact on it, with one of the images captured by the CubeSat being presented in Figure 21b [279; 280; 281; 282]. To this day, the only other undertaken CubeSat mission which was intended for asteroid exploration was the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout), a 6U CubeSat which was one of the ten CubeSats to fly on Artemis I. NEA Scout was co-developed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and JPL under the mission of performing a slow fly-by of a near-Earth asteroid, during which it would utilize its payload, the NEACam optical imager, to acquire high resolution images of the asteroid. Furthermore, with a total area of 84.6 m\({}^{2}\) in its deployed configuration, NEA Scout's main propulsion system was the largest solar sail until this day developed by NASA. However, contact with the satellite was never established after its deployment and the mission is considered lost [283]. As of the beginning of 2025, there are two more CubeSats underway to their asteroid destination. Both of these CubeSats are part of ESA's HERA mission, which was launched on 7 October 2024. The HERA mission main probe is expected to rendezvous with the binary asteroid system 65803 Didymos on 28 December 2026 [286]. Following a successful rendezvous, HERA will begin investigating the effects DART's kinetic impact had on the asteroid Dimorphos for a period of 6 months. Apart from its own instruments, the HERA probe also serves as a mother-ship carrying the Juventas and Milani 6U CubeSats. The two CubeSats will be deployed after the rendezvous to study the asteroid with their own instruments. The CubeSat Juventas has been developed by GomSpace and has the mission of the geophysical characterization of the Dimorphos binary system. Its main payload is the JuRa low-frequency radar which will be used to provide the first ever data of an asteroid's subsurface and its internal structures. JuRa was developed by Institut de Planetologie et  
Figure 21: **(a) A stowed Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) being integrated with the CubeSat dispenser carried by the main Double Asteroid Redirction Test (DART) probe. Picture by NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitmanu [284]. (b) One of the pictures captured by the LICIACube on 26 September 2022, minutes after the impact of DART on the asteroid Dimorphos with the resulting dust plume being clearly visible. Picture by NASA/Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) [285].