NASA’s ESCAPADE mission has a big day ahead. The two spacecraft Blue and Gold, built by Rocket Lab, will execute their first engine burns starting tomorrow (December 3) on their way to Mars. This ‘Trajectory Correction Maneuver’ will be the first of three major ones to be carried out by Rocket Lab, before they hand over the controls to University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab, NASA’s partner in this mission.
Short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, ESCAPADE launched on November 14 as the world’s first twin-spacecraft mission.
How do engine burns work?
The engine burn procedures are executed after mission teams complete a spacecraft’s commissioning – a process that gets all subsystems up and running. During this process, the spacecraft’s main engine or smaller, secondary thrusters are fired to correct its course in space. Big maneuvers require main engines to fire for a set duration of time to accelerate and slow down a spacecraft or change its trajectory.
ESCAPADE involves two orbiters named Blue and Gold, and the December 3 burn is likely to use the main engine for short-duration firing. According to Rocket Lab, Blue will ignite its engine for 15 seconds, using 2 kg of propellant to change the velocity by 11.5 meters per second.
So you’re in space and on the way to Mars, what next? Time to fire up the engines 🛰️🛰️
Now that Blue and Gold are commissioned, our spacecraft operators are turning their attention to propulsion systems in preparation for the first engine burns to set us on a precise course to… pic.twitter.com/jFr9VkKjtL
— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) December 1, 2025
“This is our initial demonstration maneuver to verify all systems perform as expected. Our fault management limits will be at their tightest to be conservative, based on margined modelling of how we expect the systems to perform,” Rocket Lab said in a statement. The second line above means the team is keeping safety thresholds very tight because this is the first burn and they only have model-based predictions of how the engines will perform in vacuum. If there’s even the slightest anomaly, the burn will stop.
Gold’s engines will be fired on December 8 or 9 to achieve the same result as Blue. One of the orbiters recently sent the first images from space.
The second TCM of Blue and Gold is expected on December 11 and December 16, respectively. It will be a longer burn of 257 seconds to deliver 200 meters per second of delta V (change in velocity). Rocket Lab says this burn will reveal how strong the engines’ thrust is, how efficiently the fuel burns and how much propellant remains. If efficiency is high, Blue and Gold will be left with more propellant when they reach Mars. This will enable them to stay in the Martian orbit longer (because they could overcome orbital decay using engine burns) and help scientists collect more data.
The third burn is tentatively planned as a final clean-up maneuver, although it may not be needed. After this, Rocket Lab will hand over the mission to UC Berkley. A total of 37 burns are planned for ESCAPADE – 29 on the way to Mars and eight to adjust orbits around the planet.
ESCAPADE’s detour to Lagrange point
The ESCAPADE satellites are not directly going to Mars. They’re taking a detour to the second Earth-Sun Lagrange point where they’ll stay until next November. This will give mission teams time to fine-tune the spacecraft components until Earth and Mars get close in late 2026. Blue and Gold will then once again ignite their engines for a Trans-Mars Injection burn in November 2026 and kickstart their 10 month cruise phase to the red planet.
In September 2027, both orbiters will begin the Mars Orbit Insertion maneuvers to enter the Martian orbit. They will eventually occupy different orbits around Mars to study the interaction of the solar wind with the planet’s magnetosphere for a planned duration of 11 months. The objective is to find out how Mars lost its atmosphere and eventually its oceans, and whether Earth might share the same fate.
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