NASA’s ESCAPADE mission is finally off to Mars after suffering multiple delays due to bad weather and solar storm. It lifted off atop Blue Origin‘s New Glenn rocket at 1:15 am IST on November 14 (3:45 pm EST, Nov 13) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and injected the spacecraft into the desired orbit with impressive accuracy. Blue Origin achieved another milestone in this mission – landing the first stage New Glenn booster on a drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean on its second attempt.
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 13, 2025
Blue Origin’s CEO Dave Limp declared the mission a complete success adding, “never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try. This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.“
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 13, 2025
SpaceX was the first company to achieve booster landing both on land and sea with Falcon 9, but Falcon boosters are much smaller (41.2 metres) as compared to New Glenn’s (57 metres).
What is ESCAPADE?
ESCAPADE is the world’s first twin-spacecraft mission that is Mars-bound to study the red planet’s magnetosphere and its interaction with solar winds. The satellites named Blue and Gold, built by Rocket Lab, are designed to fly in separate elliptical orbits around Mars to study how the planet lost its atmosphere and eventually its oceans.
According to University of California, Berkeley, which will lead the science operations, Blue and Gold will fly in formation to map the magnetic fields, upper atmosphere and ionosphere of Mars in 3D.
“The geological evidence shows that Mars once had water on it, and in order to keep the water, you need a thick atmosphere,” space physicist Shaoxui Xu, deputy principal investigator for the mission, said in a statement. “So we know that there was a thick enough atmosphere on Mars once upon a time, but now it is very tenuous. 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.“
If Earth’s magnetosphere weakens significantly, the solar wind could strip away the atmosphere and eventually our planet might also lose all its water.
READ MORE: ESCAPADE: Why It May Be NASA’s Most Important Mars Mission In Years
What’s next for ESCAPADE?
After its successful orbital insertion, the two satellites established communications with mission control before crusing towards the second Lagrange Point (L2).
“The twins are talking! We have successfully established contact with both ESCAPADE spacecraft, Blue and Gold. We’re on our way to Mars to enable @NASA and @ucbssl to study the Martian magnetosphere!” Rocket Lab said in an update on X.
In the next few hours and days, the satellites will deploy their antennas and solar arrays while correcting their course for journey to L2. ESCAPADE’s path to Mars is like no other, because the mission team has decided to park it in a ‘libration loiter orbit’ at L2 until late 2026. It will take the orbiters about a month to reach the spot where they will spend a year. L2 is where NASA has stationed the James Webb Space Telescope because it offers a great view of the universe, free from atmospheric disturbance, and a gravitationally stable location which significantly saves fuel.
According to NASA, Mars and Earth are currently on the opposite sides of the Sun and a journey to the red planet will increase travel time and fuel consumption. So ESCAPADE will wait until Earth and Mars properly align late next year. When the time is right, the satellites will loop back to Earth and use its gravity to slingshot towards Mars. This will kickstart their 11-month journey to the red planet.
After arriving on Mars, the orbiters will occupy separate orbits and use their four identical instruments to observe the planet from different vantage points. “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 Robert Lillis, ESCAPADE principal investigator of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL). Interestingly, ESCAPADE will work in tandem with NASA’s MAVEN orbiter along with the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and Mars Express spacecraft.
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