NASA has quietly launched a pair of tiny, toaster oven-sized satellites on a shadowy and controversial mission to Mars designed to push the limits of space exploration while proving that it can be done on the cheap. The twin probes, which together make up the ESCAPADE mission led by the University of California, Berkeley, are flying on a commercial rocket and following an itinerary that swoops through a Sun–Earth Lagrange point before swinging back past Earth and aiming for the Red Planet.
A New Low-Energy Route to Mars Using V∞ Leveraging
During a narrow launch window just once every 26 months, most missions to Mars rely on a conventional Hohmann transfer. ESCAPADE is taking a new approach—a low-energy, multi-leg path that first parks the spacecraft at an eyebrow-raising distance in the direction of the Sun from Earth, then uses one more slingshot move to catch up with Mars after flying by Earth. Mission designers refer to this as V∞-leveraging, and they have drawn from “weak stability boundary” tools developed during lunar missions to reduce the amount of propellant needed and increase departure options.
The detour is more than a nifty strategy for dealing with scheduling hiccups. If it works as predicted, it will provide NASA a brief for how to get multiple vehicles off the ground for future human expeditions over months, rather than trying to do it all in a few weeks. The same cadence could be important for when you’re sending crewed transportation, cargo landers, habitats, or propellant depots that need to take off on different schedules but still meet one another in unison at Mars.
Twin Probes Set Out to Answer How Mars Loses Its Air
ESCAPADE (short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) aims to solve a longstanding puzzle: how the solar wind and radiation whittle away Mars’ air. “Mars does not have a global magnetic field, so the atmosphere is open to space weather in ways that Earth’s is not,” said Shannon Curry of the University of California, Berkeley. NASA’s MAVEN orbiter found that when the Sun is particularly active, such violent events can supercharge atmospheric loss, sometimes raising escape rates by an order of magnitude during storms. But tracing cause and effect is difficult late in the process, as disturbances clear through the system in just a few minutes.
That’s why ESCAPADE flies two satellites, named Blue and Gold, apropos. Built by Rocket Lab, each is about the size of a stack of household appliances and is equipped with magnetometers and plasma analyzers to map magnetic fields, charged particles, and the ionosphere in unison. The two will follow nearly identical orbits, separated only by minutes and providing scientists with a stereo view of how solar gusts move through the region and precisely how atmospheric ions are stripped away and accelerated out into space.
The measurements together should sharpen models of the Martian ionosphere and magnetotail, reduce uncertainties in calculations of the escape rate from Mars, and improve predictions of how intense radiation spikes may be that could prove dangerous to future crews. Results will draw from those of MAVEN and Europe’s Mars Express, covering the gap in timing that has hindered single-satellite analyses.
Small Budget, Big Ambition for a Fast, Frugal Mars Mission
ESCAPADE is a demonstration case for how to do planetary science a lot faster and cheaper. All told, the mission is not to exceed about $80 million through NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program. Rocket Lab built and delivered the twin probes for $57 million in around 3.5 years—wicked fast for interplanetary hardware. By way of comparison, previous Mars orbiters such as MAVEN and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ran up price tags of $600 million to $700 million, meaning that ESCAPADE was about 85% to 90% cheaper.
The launch on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, an anticipated heavy-lift vehicle, illustrates NASA’s increasing dependence on commercial companies. By matching a big rocket with small, uniform spacecraft, two fully capable probes could hitchhike. The mission is led by UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, its first to be managed under the umbrella of a NASA planetary project, and is being operated out of the campus with participation from NASA centers and industry partners.
Why It Matters for Human Missions: Safety and Communications
To safely get people out of low Earth orbit, NASA requires improved space-weather forecasting and communications systems that can better withstand cosmic threats. By charting how storms alter Mars’s upper atmosphere on the fly, ESCAPADE data will guide radiation shielding strategies and help responders know where crews should take shelter during solar events. Better ionospheric models will also aid engineers designing radio navigation and links that have to thread a dynamic, charged environment.
The route itself could be the understated breakthrough. Lagrange-point staging is a leg up to where just about everybody else can sit down and design the mission, L1 leg, Earth flyby and all, spang-dab in the middle of three or four launches; you can spread your mass out over multiple launches… de-risk the integration activity… prevent manufacturing surges—that’s exactly where NASA is going with its Mars architecture, it sounds like—flatten their bowls of peas so they don’t run off.
Following a nearly 22-month cruise, the two probes will spend months more trimming their orbits before full science operations begin. If all goes as planned, ESCAPADE will bring a double helping of insight into the once-wet world and its disappearing air—and into how to get to Mars in the first place.