NASA plans to launch its first mission that will visit two asteroids as a single system, on Sunday, Nov. 9, from Cape Canaveral in Florida. In a first-of-its-kind mission, the goal is to launch two identical spacecraft to map the Martian upper atmosphere and its boundary with space.The two machines, named Blue and Gold after University of California Berkeley’s school colors, seek to change our understanding of Mars’ mysterious near-space environment, which acts as a shield against solar winds.
The ESCAPADE spacecraft, overseen and operated by UC Berkeley and built by Rocket Lab USA, will create the first stereo imaging of Mars’ magnetosphere and atmospheric escape processes. Arriving in 2027, they will each fly in close to synchronized orbits that will follow one another like “pearls on a string,” enabling scientists to monitor the time variability of Mars’ magnetosphere and atmospheric escape processes over scales never achieved before.
Among its primary objectives is to help scientists determine how and when Mars lost its atmosphere, an event that evidenced the planet’s shift from a potentially habitable environment into the inhospitable desert it is today. By characterizing variability in Mars’ ionosphere, ESCAPADE will also enable improvements to corrections for radio-signal distortions needed for future human communication and navigation on Mars. The objective of the mission is to gather critical data that will inform whether potential future crewed missions and SHA-s would be possible on Mars.
What’s remarkable about ESCAPADE is that it subscribes to a low-cost, novel commercial model that takes on risk. The satellites will be sent to space on the second flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. Unlike conventional Mars missions, which lift off during specific planetary alignment windows every 26 months, ESCAPADE will instead first journey to the L2 Lagrange point where the gravitational forces of Earth and Sun reach equilibrium before looping in on itself for one year and shooting out toward Mars at a time when it resynchronizes with Earth every two years.
The mission will last about 11 months once it is in orbit around Mars. It will do a lot of scientific research, such as mapping the planet’s magnetic field and studying how the solar wind affects the loss of atmosphere. ESCAPADE will lay the important scientific groundwork for the next big step for humanity: sending people to Mars.