NASA spacecraft will have company all the way to Mars

NASA's next Mars explorer is going to have company all the way to the red planet: a couple of puny yet groundbreaking sidekicks.

Named after the characters in the 2008 animated movie, the small satellites WALL-E and EVE are hitching a ride on the Atlas V rocket set to launch early Saturday morning from California with the Mars InSight lander.

This illustration made available by NASA on March 29, 2018 shows the twin Mars Cube One (MarCO) spacecraft flying over Mars with Earth and the sun in the distance. (NASA/JPL-Caltech via AP)

Similar in size to a briefcase or large cereal box, the satellites with pop out from the rocket's upper stage following liftoff and hightail it to Mars, right behind InSight.

It will be the first time little cube-shaped satellites, CubeSats as they're known, set sail for deep space. The journey will span 6 1/2 months and 300 million miles (485 million kilometers).

A brief look at the $18.5 million experiment tagging along with InSight:

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MINI SATS:

Miniature satellites, or CubeSats, have been piggybacking on big-ticket space missions for well over a decade, providing relatively cheap and fast access to orbit for students and other out-of-the-mainstream experimenters. Until now, the hundreds of CubeSats have been confined to Earth orbit. That's about to change with NASA's Mars Cube One project, or MarCO . The European Space Agency, meanwhile, has its CubeSat sights on the moon. A recent competition yielded two winning proposals: a CubeSat to explore the moon's far side from lunar orbit, another to probe a permanently shadowed crater near the moon's south pole, also from lunar orbit. NASA is also looking to send CubeSats to the moon, as well as an asteroid.

In this undated photo made available by NASA on March 29, 2018, engineer Joel Steinkraus uses sunlight to test the solar arrays on one of the Mars Cube One (MarCO) spacecraft at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. (NASA/JPL-Caltech via AP)

MOVIE CONNECTION:

It turns out that these twin cubes are equipped with the same type of cold gas propulsion system used in fire extinguishers to spray foam. The movie WALL-E uses a fire extinguisher to propel through space. Team members couldn't resist the connection, thus the names WALL-E and EVE for the two mini spacecraft. Engineers want to test this compact propulsion system for guiding the 30-pound (13.6-kilogram) cubes to Mars.

GETTING TO MARS:

Once free from the rocket's upper stage following liftoff, WALL-E and EVE will trail a few thousand miles (kilometers) behind InSight en route to Mars. The two mini spacecraft will also be a few thousand miles (kilometers) apart from one another. That's to prevent any collisions or even close calls. While that may seem far apart, it's actually fairly close by space standards, according to Brian Clement, an engineer on the project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. While InSight will be stopping at Mars on Nov. 26, WALL-E and EVE will zoom past the planet from about 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) out. Don't expect any Thunderbird pilot-theatrics as the cubes fly by, like a tilting of the solar wings in salute. "That would make a great movie, but that's definitely not the way we're going to do it," Clement said.

In this photo privided by NASA, the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas-V rocket is viewed with NASA's InSight spacecraft onboard, Thursday, May 3, 2018, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. (Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP)

EXTRA EARS:

Besides testing the cubes' maneuvering system, NASA wants to see if WALL-E and EVE can transmit data to Earth from InSight during its descent to Mars. If the experiment succeeds, it should take just several minutes for flight controllers to hear from the cubes. No worries if they're silent. NASA will rely on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter already circling the planet as the main communication link with InSight during descent and touchdown. It will take a lot longer, though, to get confirmation. The beauty of a CubeSat relay system is that it could provide descent information at planets and other cosmic stop-offs lacking established communications.

POST MARS:

Once past Mars, WALL-E and EVE will remain in an elliptical orbit around the sun, together for years to come. But they won't work for long. Once they run out of fuel, they won't be able to point their solar wings toward the sun for recharging.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Russia and Ukraine on Monday traded blame before the United Nations Security Council for the attacks on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said have put the world “dangerously close to a nuclear accident.”

Without attributing blame, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said his agency has been able to confirm three attacks against the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant since April 7.

“These reckless attacks must cease immediately,” he told the Security Council. “Though, fortunately, they have not led to a radiological incident this time, they significantly increase the risk … where nuclear safety is already compromised.”

The remote-controlled nature of the drones that have attacked the plant means that it is impossible to definitively determine who launched them, Grossi told reporters after the meeting.

“In order to say something like that, we must have proof,” he said. “These attacks have been performed with a multitude of drones.”

Zaporizhzhia sits in Russian-controlled territory in southeastern Ukraine and has six nuclear reactors.

Fears of a nuclear catastrophe have been at the forefront since Russian troops occupied the plant shortly after invading in February 2022. Continued fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces — as well as the tense supply situation at the plant — have raised the specter of a disaster.

Ukraine and its allies on Monday again blamed Russia for dangers at the site, with the United States saying, “Russia does not care about these risks.”

“If it did, it would not continue to forcibly control the plant,” U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood told the Security Council, which met at the initiative of the U.S. and Slovenia.

Russia, for its part, said Ukraine was to blame for the attacks.

“The IAEA’s report does not pinpoint which side is behind the attacks,” Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said. “We know full well who it is.”

“Over the last few months, such attacks not only resumed,” Nebenzia said, “they significantly intensified.”

Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.N., Sergiy Kyslytsya, called the attacks “a well-planned false flag operation by the Russian Federation,” which he alleged Russia had designed to distract the world from its invasion of its neighbor.

The Zaporizhzhia facility is one of the 10 biggest nuclear plants in the world. Fighting in the southern part of Ukraine where it is located has raised the specter of a potential nuclear disaster like the one at Chernobyl in 1986, where a reactor exploded and blew deadly radiation across a vast area.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine in recent months has been able to make significant advances along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line crossing eastern and southern Ukraine. Drones, artillery and missiles have featured heavily in what has become a war of attrition.

Russia and Ukraine have frequently traded accusations over the Zaporizhzhia plant.

The most recent strikes did not compromise the facility, which is designed to withstand a commercial airliner crashing into it, the IAEA said.

The plant’s six reactors have been shut down for months, but it still needs power and qualified staff to operate crucial cooling systems and other safety features.

FILE - The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe's largest, is seen in the background of the shallow Kakhovka Reservoir after the dam collapse, in Energodar, Russian-occupied Ukraine, Tuesday, June 27, 2023. Officials at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant said that the site was attacked Sunday April 7, 2024, by Ukrainian military drones, including a strike on the dome of the plant’s sixth power unit. (AP Photo/Libkos, File)

IAEA warns that attacks on a nuclear plant in Russian-controlled Ukraine put the world at risk

IAEA warns that attacks on a nuclear plant in Russian-controlled Ukraine put the world at risk