In recent years satellites have gotten smaller, scaling all the way down to CubeSats and even smaller spacecraft. Rockets have followed, too, with a surge in development of much smaller boosters for small satellites.
This miniaturization revolution has not come to robotic landers and rovers—yet. That should soon change, driven in part by a request from NASA for small, relatively low-cost instruments and experiments that could be sent to the lunar surface in the early 2020s to conduct scientific research on the Moon. Proposals for this Lunar Surface Instrument and Technology Payloads program were due at the space agency last Monday.
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