NASA is preparing to launch its first dual-satellite mission to another planet, the ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission, in early November from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission is managed and operated by the University of California, Berkeley, marking the university’s first time leading a planetary mission for NASA.
The two identical satellites, named Blue and Gold after UC Berkeley’s school colors, will fly in formation around Mars to map its magnetic fields, upper atmosphere, and ionosphere in three dimensions. This will provide scientists with an unprecedented stereo view of Mars’ near-space environment.
According to Robert Lillis, principal investigator of ESCAPADE at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), understanding how Mars’ ionosphere varies is essential for future 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.”
The satellites are expected to arrive at Mars in 2027. They will be operated from SSL’s mission operations center near the UC Berkeley campus. The scientific instruments and onboard systems were built by UC Berkeley and its partners; Rocket Lab USA constructed the spacecraft themselves. The New Glenn rocket from Blue Origin will carry ESCAPADE into space.
Mars lacks a global magnetic field like Earth’s and has only a thin atmosphere. As a result, anyone living on its surface would have limited protection from high-energy particle radiation generated by solar storms or cosmic rays. Lillis highlighted this risk: “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.”
ESCAPADE will also test a new trajectory for traveling to Mars. Instead of following the typical Hohmann Transfer used by previous missions—which restricts launches to a narrow window every 26 months—ESCAPADE will travel first to a gravitational balance point known as a Lagrange point before returning toward Earth for a slingshot maneuver that sends it on toward Mars during planetary alignment.
Jeffrey Parker of Advanced Space LLC explained: “Can we launch to Mars when the planets are not aligned? ESCAPADE is paving the way for that.” This approach could help future missions by allowing more flexible launch schedules—important if large numbers of crewed or uncrewed ships are sent during each alignment period.
UC Berkeley has contributed scientific instruments to several past Mars missions over nearly six decades. These include NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor (launched 1996), which discovered that Mars lost its global magnetic field about four billion years ago; NASA’s MAVEN (2013); and the Emirates Mars Mission Hope probe (2020). Research has shown that while Mars does not have a global magnetic field today, it retains localized crustal magnetism due to ancient processes.
Lillis described these findings: “Mars has this patchy crustal magnetism that results in magnetic fields that are locally strong though generally far weaker than Earth’s field… They’re effective at pushing the solar wind away up to 1,500 km away from the surface.”
The twin ESCAPADE probes will fly different orbits around Mars, offering real-time data about how its atmosphere reacts to changes in solar wind—a stream of charged particles from the sun believed responsible for stripping away much of Martian atmosphere over billions of years. The research may shed light on what happened to water once present on ancient Martian lakes and rivers.
“To understand how the solar wind drives different kinds of atmospheric escape is a key piece of the puzzle of the climate evolution of Mars. ESCAPADE gives us what you might call a stereo perspective — two different vantage points simultaneously,” said Lillis.
Shaoxui Xu, deputy principal investigator for ESCAPADE, added: “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 to the evolution of the atmosphere.”
Instruments aboard ESCAPADE include electrostatic analyzers built at UC Berkeley designed to measure particle fluxes escaping from Mars. Gwen Hanley from SSL explained their purpose: “We’ll know which direction (the particles) are going and what energies they have, which tells us if they’re coming back to Mars or if they are able to leave Mars.” Phyllis Whittlesey added: “We can learn a lot about the way that particles are flowing and the electric fields that accelerate ions and electrons and the local Mars environment.”
Additional contributions come from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (magnetic field detector), Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (plasma measurement device), and Northern Arizona University (onboard camera).
The total cost for delivering both spacecraft was $49 million—a fraction compared with earlier planetary missions—reflecting increased commercial involvement through companies like Rocket Lab USA. Lillis commented: “ESCAPADE represents a new way of doing things, with much lower cost, more commercial involvement, and a somewhat higher risk tolerance… 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.”
After arrival at Mars in 2027, Blue and Gold will take about seven months adjusting their orbits so they can follow each other closely—a setup intended for monitoring short-term variability within Martian space weather systems more effectively than previous single-satellite missions.
Lillis summarized some challenges ahead: “It is definitely going to be a challenge to establish a human settlement on Mars… But, you know, humans are tenacious, right?”
For further information about ESCAPADE:
– NASA’s ESCAPADE website
– UC Berkeley ESCAPADE website
