A white paper submitted to the U.K. Space Agency's 2035 Space Frontiers program proposes a novel mission to study near-Earth asteroids up close. Dubbed REMORA — short for REndezvous Mission for Orbital Reconstruction of Asteroids — the plan envisions a swarm of autonomous CubeSats designed to tag, track, and characterize multiple targets.
The concept addresses a fundamental limitation in asteroid science: ground-based telescopes and even orbiting observatories can only perform remote sensing. To truly determine an asteroid's composition, a physical probe must visit it. REMORA aims to fill that gap by deploying a coordinated fleet rather than a single expensive spacecraft.
Details of the mission architecture appear in a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server. The CubeSats would operate autonomously as a swarm, potentially enabling simultaneous study of several near-Earth objects in a single mission — a significant efficiency gain over traditional one-probe-per-asteroid approaches.
If selected, REMORA would mark a shift toward distributed, low-cost planetary science missions. The approach could accelerate our understanding of asteroid composition, which has implications for planetary defense, resource utilization, and solar system formation theories. The U.K. Space Agency has not yet announced which proposals will advance.
Critics may question the feasibility of coordinating multiple autonomous spacecraft in deep space, where communication delays and navigation challenges are severe. The white paper does not yet address specific technical hurdles or provide a detailed cost estimate.