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Mission record

MarCO

Also known as Mars Cube One, MarCO-A, MarCO-B, MARCOA, MARCOB

JPL · Launched

Explore trajectory

Completed · Success

MarCO (Mars Cube One) is a two spacecraft mission to accompany the InSight Mars lander to provide real-time data relay during the landing phase, as the MRO, MAVEN, and Mars Odyssey orbiters will not be in position to receive InSight data. The MarCO space craft were built at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the 6U-cubesats form factor. JPL's page describes MarCO-A and B as the first and second interplanetary CubeSats designed to monitor InSight for a short period around landing, and gives the mission's status as Past.

Destinations
Launch vehicle
Atlas V 401
Launch site
Vandenberg AFB, United States
Countries
United States
Mission types
Technology demonstrator, Flyby

Chronology

Mission timeline

  1. Launch

    Launched with InSight and flew its own cruise

    Both MarCO launch/orbital information pages give the launch as 2018-05-05T11:05:00Z, the same instant InSight's pages print. The MarCO pair carried their own communications and navigation experiments as they flew independently to the Red Planet, which is why this is a mission here rather than a vehicle of InSight. NSSDCA's Funding Agency line for both spacecraft reads NASA Jet Proplusion Laboratory (United States), a spelling of the laboratory's name that its own published page does not use; the agency committed here is JPL, which is the publisher of the mission page this record cites.

    Earth

  2. Flyby

    Relayed InSight's landing while flying past Mars

    On November 26, 2018 the pair provided a real-time communications link to Earth for InSight during its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on Mars. MarCO-B took an image of Mars from about 4,700 miles (7,600 kilometers) away during its flyby of the Red Planet on Nov. 26, 2018, while flying away from the planet after InSight landed. THE TWO NICKNAMES ARE SETTLED AGAINST GCAT'S OWN DISAGREEMENT: both NSSDCA pages say the probes are nick-named WALL-E and EVE, and each page's Alternate Names block assigns one - WALL-E to MARCO-A at 2018-042B and EVE to MARCO-B at 2018-042C. GCAT's deepcat agrees, giving D00998 MarCO-A the AltNames Wall-E and D00999 MarCO-B the AltNames Eva; GCAT's satcat reverses them, giving S43458 MarCO-A the AltNames Eve and S43459 MarCO-B the AltNames Wall-E. The nicknames are not committed as alternate names of either spacecraft, because a catalogue that contradicts itself cannot settle which is which and NSSDCA is cited here for the assignment rather than GCAT.

    Mars

Mission architecture

Vehicles

  • MarCO-A · Spacecraft

    Destinations: Mars

  • MarCO-B · Spacecraft

    Destinations: Mars

Trajectory record

Trajectory dataset not yet available

No verified trajectory dataset is committed for this mission, so Mission Atlas renders no path.

Provenance

Sources

Each source is listed once and labeled with the mission, event, trajectory, or destination/body context it supports.

Data verified through September 2, 2026