Follow Us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter NASA’s twin spacecraft are wrapping up a year-long escapade, ready to head straight to the Red Planet. The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) spacecraft launched in November 2025 on the second flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. But instead of heading directly to Mars, the two spacecraft stopped in a circular path. Now, they’re back in Earth’s neighborhood, where they tackled a crucial engine run unusually close to Earth that, if all goes well, will put them on the path to Mars. “No NASA mission has done this before,” said Rob Lillis, a space and planetary physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and principal investigator of the ESCAPADE mission. “For most missions, it’s simply not necessary.” This is because NASA’s missions to Mars have traditionally been carefully choreographed within the constraints of cosmic launch, leaving Earth during a brief window of planetary alignment that only occurs every 26 months. ESCAPADE was supposed to launch in October 2024, when Earth and Mars were favorably aligned, but delays with the New Glenn rocket forced the mission to postpone the precious launch window. Instead of waiting for launch this fall, NASA decided to try something new. ESCAPADE mission planners designed a “loose,” bean-shaped orbit. He asked that the twin probes follow that trajectory to return to Earth in early November 2026, ready to continue to Mars. Maybe you like the ESCAPADE mission’s unique path to Mars. After their launch in November 2025, the twin ESCAPADE probes rotated around the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 (L2), in a “loose” orbit that returned them to Earth in November 2026, where they used our planet’s gravity to launch to Mars. (Image credit: Advanced Space/Matt Bolliger) Once they arrived, however, the twin probes faced a major obstacle: Each had to perfectly execute an engine burn inside Earth’s gravity well. The maneuver is similar to the slingshot flybys that spacecraft regularly perform to adjust their trajectories, but here the probes had to fire their engines to amplify the combustion effect rather than acting alone. The first spacecraft tackled the feat on November 7; the second did so on Monday (November 9). And according to NASA, the burns went perfectly. “This is the first time NASA has used an Earth-powered flyby to propel a spacecraft toward Mars, and we have now executed this maneuver twice, without issue, in just two days,” Asal Naseri, acting associate flight director for NASA’s Heliophysics Division, said in a statement. After some minor course corrections, ESCAPADE will sail toward its arrival at Mars in September 2027. A scenic detour The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft have made the most of their extended range. Each spacecraft is about the size of two refrigerators and is equipped with three scientific instruments and a pair of cameras. All are designed to study Mars’ strange magnetic field, which is created globally by charged particles from the sun interacting with the atmosphere and locally by areas of highly magnetic crust. Earth’s magnetic field is much stronger and is generated by the planet’s core. But it is also affected by the solar wind, as scientists call the constant flow of charged particles flowing from the sun through space. On the side of Earth opposite the sun, the solar wind stretches the magnetic field to form an elongated tail structure, like a terrestrial windsock. What to read next A series of missions have studied this magnetic tail at various points up to nearly 800,000 miles (1.27 million kilometers) away from Earth, but beyond that, it has been a mystery. Conveniently, the two ESCAPADE spacecraft traveled through the structure over the course of about 10 days early last year at a much greater distance from Earth: about 1.19 million miles (1.91 million kilometers) away. “We were able to capture the magnetic field structure of that distant tail, how it flaps, how it moves, how the plasma flows inside it,” Lillis said, collecting data he called “unprecedented.” “And not only that, but for the first time we were able to do it with two spacecraft simultaneously.” Illustration of the ESCAPADE spacecraft in orbit around Mars. (Image credit: Rocket Lab USA/UC Berkeley) A second shot at the magnetic tail occurred during the summer, when the spacecraft was much closer to Earth but the Moon was also passing through the magnetic structure. The two ESCAPADE spacecraft were able to partner with the twin ARTEMIS-THEMIS spacecraft on the moon to observe the structure from four different perspectives simultaneously. That’s a big help when it comes to studying the magnetotail and its intricate, changing magnetic field lines and plasma, Lillis said. “These are generally not things that can be measured remotely,” he said. “You have to be there.”
