CubeSat: A candidate for the asteroid exploration in the future

CubeSat is a new kind of low cost micro satellites. Until now there are over two hundred CubeSats have been launched for many applications. In the future, CubeSat could be used for asteroid exploration. This paper gives two methods to explore the asteroids by using CubeSat. The first mothod is only use CubeSat for long range asteroid exploration. Another method is to use mother spacecraft to carry several CubeSats for exploration. For the first way, the paper analyzes the main challenges such as thruster, communication and high reliability components. It can draw a conclusion, that it is difficult to fufil the object now. For the second way, the design of the CubeSats is realistic and an possible configuraion of the CubeSat is given in the paper.