science & techNASA
NASA’s ESCAPADE Completes Powered Earth Flybys, Now En Route to Mars
Two NASA spacecraft have slingshotted off Earth on their way to Mars. The twin ESCAPADE probes each did a powered flyby, using Earth's gravity combined with a roughly nine-minute engine burn to gain speed toward the Red Planet. Closest approaches came on 7 and 9 November 2026, two days apart, and it is the first time NASA has used a powered Earth flyby to send a spacecraft to Mars. The probes are due to reach Mars in September 2027. Their job is to study how the solar wind and the Martian magnetic environment strip away the planet's atmosphere, working as a pair to see how conditions vary from place to place.
Flying two spacecraft together lets scientists observe how space weather hits Mars at the same moment from different positions. That helps explain how a planet that once had rivers and thicker air lost most of its atmosphere.
Mars has no global magnetic field today, which is one reason the solar wind can erode its atmosphere.
background
Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) is a spacecraft mission to Mars consisting of two spacecraft known as Blue and Gold, which launched in November 2025. The twin spacecraft will study Mars' magnetosphere and how solar wind contributed to the loss of most of the planet's atmosphere over Solar System history. In addition to its scientific goals, the mission is designed to demonstrate low-cost planetary space exploration. The mission is led by UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory with Dr. Robert Lillis as Principal Investigator. It is part of NASA's SIMPLEx program.
From Wikipedia: ESCAPADE (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗.jpg)
