ESCAPADE

ESCAPADE, the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, is a NASA mission of two identical spacecraft that are to orbit Mars and study how the solar wind interacts with the planet's magnetic environment and drives the loss of its atmosphere.^[1] Its aim is to help explain how Mars lost the thick atmosphere it once had, which may have supported liquid water.^[1]

The mission

ESCAPADE launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 13 November 2025.^[1] Earth and Mars were not aligned for a direct trip at that time, so the spacecraft went into a waiting orbit around a Lagrange point about a million miles from Earth.^[1] A flyby of Earth in November 2026 is planned to send them toward Mars, with arrival in September 2027.^[2]

Two spacecraft, two views

At Mars, the spacecraft are first to fly one behind the other in the same orbit for six months, passing the same places a few minutes apart to catch rapid changes.^[1] In a second five-month campaign, one is to fly farther from Mars, in the solar wind, while the other stays closer, inside the planet's magnetic environment, so both sides are measured at once.^[1] They are to measure Mars' upper atmosphere and magnetic environment between about 160 and 10,000 km above the surface.^[1]

ESCAPADE is managed by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, with partners including Rocket Lab, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Blue Origin.^[1] What drives the solar wind's bursts is covered in Solar storms.