NASA is preparing to launch the ESCAPADE mission, which will send two identical satellites to Mars. The launch is scheduled for no earlier than November 9 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission, called Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE), marks the first time a dual-satellite system will travel to another planet.
The satellites, named Blue and Gold after the University of California, Berkeley’s school colors, are managed and operated by UC Berkeley. They are designed to fly in formation around Mars to create a three-dimensional map of the planet’s magnetic fields, upper atmosphere, and ionosphere. This mapping will help scientists understand how Mars lost its atmosphere and assess environmental conditions that could impact future human missions.
“Understanding how the ionosphere varies will be a really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in radio signals that we will need to communicate with each other and to navigate on Mars,” said ESCAPADE principal investigator Robert Lillis of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL).
The satellites are expected to reach Mars in 2027 and will be operated from SSL’s mission operations center near UC Berkeley. The science instruments were built by UC Berkeley and its partners; Rocket Lab USA constructed the spacecraft themselves. The launch vehicle is Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.
Mars lacks both a global magnetic field like Earth’s and a thick protective atmosphere. This leaves it exposed to solar storms that can increase radiation levels on its surface significantly—a risk for any future human explorers or settlers. “We will be making the space weather measurements we need to understand the system well enough to forecast solar storms whose radiation could harm astronauts on the surface of Mars or in orbit,” Lillis said.
ESCAPADE also plans to test an alternative route to Mars using a trajectory through a Lagrange point before returning toward Earth for a slingshot maneuver out toward Mars during planetary alignment. This approach may allow more flexible scheduling for future missions compared with traditional Hohmann Transfer routes.
“Can we launch to Mars when the planets are not aligned? ESCAPADE is paving the way for that,” said Jeffrey Parker of Advanced Space LLC at a recent conference.
UC Berkeley has been involved in building instruments for Martian exploration for nearly six decades. Previous contributions include equipment on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor—which helped determine that Mars lost its global magnetic field billions of years ago—and ongoing participation in NASA’s MAVEN mission as well as the Emirates Mars Mission Hope probe.
According to Shaoxui Xu, deputy principal investigator: “The geological evidence shows that Mars once had water on it, and in order to keep the water, you need a thick atmosphere… There are only two ways for atmosphere to leave — either go into the ground or escape to space, and there are a lot of studies showing that escape has been a very significant contributor.”
ESCAPADE received funding through NASA’s SIMPLEx program aimed at supporting cost-effective planetary missions. Rocket Lab USA built and tested both spacecraft at its Long Beach facility; total delivery costs were $49 million.
“ESCAPADE represents a new way of doing things, with much lower cost, more commercial involvement, and a somewhat higher risk tolerance,” Lillis said. “The reliability of individual components and subsystems has improved, so it’s possible to send two spacecraft to Mars for roughly one-tenth of what it would have cost 10 or 15 years ago.”
Once they arrive at their destination orbit around Mars after about seven months’ adjustment period, both satellites will follow synchronized paths allowing them close-proximity measurements over short timescales—something previous single-spacecraft missions could not achieve.
“That’s important scientifically because it lets us monitor the short timescale variability of the system… When we have two spacecraft crossing those regions in quick succession, we can monitor how those regions vary on timescales as short as two minutes and up to 30 minutes,” Lillis explained.
Onboard experiments include electrostatic analyzers from UC Berkeley measuring escaping particles from Martian atmosphere; additional devices come from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (magnetic field detector), Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (plasma measurement), and Northern Arizona University (camera imaging dust/aurora).
“It is definitely going to be a challenge to establish a human settlement on Mars,” Lillis added regarding prospects for living conditions on Martian soil due largely to harsh environmental factors such as low pressure and high cosmic radiation exposure.“But you know humans are tenacious,right?”
