Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Launches NASA's ESCAPADE Mission To Mars Aboard Its New Glenn Rocket

 

 

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launched two NASA satellites atop its giant New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, successfully sending the US space agency's ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorer) mission on its journey to Mars by inserting the twin spacecraft into the designated loiter orbit. Launched at 3:55 PM EST on Thursday or at 2:25 AM IST on Friday, the flight marked the second mission for the Blue Origin rocket.

 

The ESCAPADE twin spacecraft, built by Rocket Lab, will study how the magnetic environment of Mars is impacted by the Sun. It will investigate how a never-ending, million-mile-per-hour stream of particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind, has gradually stripped away much of the Martian atmosphere, causing the planet to cool and its surface water to evaporate. Led by the University of California, Berkeley, the mission will help NASA prepare for future human exploration of Mars.

 

After a 10-month journey, ESCAPADE will arrive at Mars by September 2027, becoming the first coordinated dual-spacecraft mission to enter orbit around another planet. It will begin the science campaign in June 2028.

 

Currently, Earth and Mars are positioned on opposite sides of the Sun, making interplanetary travel between them more challenging. Rather than heading directly to Mars, the twin spacecraft will first head to a location in space a million miles from Earth called Lagrange point 2, NASA explained. In November 2026, when the two planets align more closely in their orbits, NASA’s ESCAPADE spacecraft will swing back toward Earth and use its gravity to perform a slingshot manoeuvr, propelling itself toward Mars.

This approach eliminates the need to wait for a brief window of time when Earth and Mars are aligned, which happens roughly every two years. The trajectory, which ESCAPADE is using, will also allow future missions to launch nearly anytime and wait in space, queueing up for their interplanetary departure, until the two planets are in position.

 

This original “Earth-proximity” or “loiter” orbit will also make ESCAPADE the first mission to ever pass through a distant region of Earth’s magnetotail, part of our planet’s magnetic field that gets stretched out away from the Sun by the solar wind, NASA explained.

 

Over several months, the ESCAPADE will arrange itself in its initial science formation, where two satellites will follow each other in the same “string-of-pearls” orbit, passing through the same areas in quick succession. They will investigate how space weather conditions vary on short timescales.

Six months after the start of the science campaign in September 2027, both satellites will shift into different orbits, with one travelling farther from Mars and the other staying closer to it. The second formation, planned to last for five months, aims to study the solar wind and Mars’ upper atmosphere simultaneously, allowing scientists to investigate how the planet responds to the solar wind in real time.

 

"In addition, ESCAPADE will provide more information about Mars’ ionosphere—a part of the upper atmosphere that future astronauts will rely on to send radio and navigation signals around the planet," NASA explained.

 

In addition to deploying the NASA spacecraft, Blue Origin also managed to land the fully reusable first stage on Jacklyn in the Atlantic Ocean. Furthermore, the Viasat HaloNet demonstration onboard New Glenn’s second stage successfully executed the first flight test of Viasat’s telemetry data relay service for NASA’s Communications

 

Blue Origin says that the New Glenn rocket underpins its efforts to establish a sustained human presence on the Moon, harness in-space resources, provide multi-mission, multi-orbit mobility through Blue Ring, and establish destinations in low Earth orbit.

The New Glenn program currently has multiple vehicles in production and a backlog of orders spanning several years. In addition to NASA and Viasat, its customer base includes Amazon’s Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile, and various telecommunications providers. The recent mission marked New Glenn’s second certification flight under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program.

Blue Origin is also working with the US Space Force to certify New Glenn for NSSL missions.