CNES perspectives for affordable missions to Deep Space

French involvement in affordable deep space missions has been illustrated over the last few years by the accomplishments of the Philae lander in 2014, and by the mission of the Mascot lander, developed with DLR, which was dropped in October 2018 by JAXA’s Hayabusa 2 probe on asteroid Ryugu. The value of CNES dedicated engineering skills, such as mission analysis for the descent to small bodies, and of French laboratories know how in the development of high performance – miniaturised instruments, has been demonstrated on both missions. It will be put into practice again through our contribution to JAXA’s MMX mission to Phobos in 2024, and more mission concepts are also being defined in partnership with major Space Agencies.

In the cases above, cubesats or small lander / rovers depend on a larger spacecraft for deployment and other resources, such as telecommunication relay or propulsion. Under other circumstances, teams of cubesats can also be deployed and perform advanced tasks such as telecommunication relay or distributed scientific measurements. This may involve surface networks, constellations of orbiters, or a combination of both.

After giving an overview of the French involvement on small deep space spacecraft, we will identify the science goals and investigations where cubesats and smallsats can make a unique contribution as science enablers and enhancers. The second part of the presentation will elaborate on mission architectures for the most promising concepts where cubesat size devices offer an advantage in terms of affordability, efficiency, and capacity to take risks.