A BIG binar is visiting WA Museum Boola Bardip for the school holidays, collecting messages for future space trips inside a giant version of the tiny vessel.

A Binar is a little cube satellite just 10cm tall, designed, built and coded at Curtin uni. The first, Binar-1, was equipped with two cameras and launched on August 28 on one of the regular ISS resupply missions. With two more launches planned in 2022, the plan is to form an array to provide high-res magnetometry of the moon’s precious resources.

The Binar are named after the Noongar word for fireball, which they’ll resemble when they fall back through the atmosphere, and the name is also a nod to Curtin’s Desert Fireball network who search for meteorites. 

by DAVID BELL