ESA has designed its first stand-alone CubeSat mission for deep space – aimed at targeting a little-known class of asteroid: small in size and rapidly spinning. Studied in ESTEC’s Concurrent Design Facility, ESA’s highly networked facility for designing novel missions, the ‘Miniaturised – Asteroid Remote Geophysical Observer’ (or M–ARGO) is a nano-spacecraft based on the CubeSat design using standardised 10 cm cubic units within which electronic boards can be stacked and subsystems attached. See http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2017/06/M_ARGO
