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### NASA Prepares First Dual-Satellite Mission to Mars
NASA is gearing up for the first dual-satellite mission to another planet. Scheduled to launch no earlier than Sunday, November 9, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission involves a pair of identical spacecraft tasked with traveling to Mars.
Once in orbit around the Red Planet, these spacecraft will create detailed three-dimensional maps of Mars’ upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetic fields.
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### A 12-Month Journey to Mars
ESCAPADE is overseen by the University of California, Berkeley, which named the spacecraft’s onboard satellites Blue and Gold, inspired by the school’s colors. Alongside its primary scientific objectives, ESCAPADE will be the first mission to Mars to use a new trajectory path.
Previous missions relied on the Hohmann Transfer, a 7 to 11 month-long route that is fuel-efficient but requires extremely narrow launch windows—typically only a few weeks every 26 months. ESCAPADE will take a different approach.
Instead of the Hohmann Transfer, ESCAPADE will initially travel to a Lagrange point—a unique location in space where the gravitational forces of Earth and the Sun balance out. From there, it will follow a kidney bean-shaped, 12-month orbit that arcs back toward Earth.
In early November 2026, ESCAPADE will fire its engines to slingshot around Earth, using this momentum to propel itself onward to Mars.
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### A New Way to Map the Martian Atmosphere
The Martian satellites are expected to arrive in early 2027. Upon arrival, Blue and Gold will activate their instrument arrays and data processing systems and deploy boom arrays for measurement.
Creating a comprehensive map of Mars’ magnetic fields is critical for future human missions to the planet. Unlike Earth, Mars lost its atmosphere approximately four billion years ago. Without this protective layer, the planet is constantly exposed to intense solar radiation.
For instance, in a recent event captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover, a solar storm generated radiation equivalent to 100 days’ worth of the Milky Way’s usual background radiation within a single day.
Solar storms are powerful enough to disrupt electrical grids on Earth despite its atmosphere. On Mars, however, such storms would pose a serious threat to astronauts unless properly shielded.
ESCAPADE’s principal investigator, Robert Lillis, explains that the satellites will perform crucial space weather measurements. These data will help scientists forecast solar storms that could endanger human explorers on Mars or orbiting the planet.
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### Measuring Mars’ Magnetized Crust
While Mars no longer has a global magnetic field like Earth, it still possesses localized magnetic fields generated by its magnetized crust. These fields can repel the solar wind up to 932 miles above the planet’s surface, potentially interfering with communication signals.
“Understanding how the ionosphere varies will be a really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in radio signals that we will need to communicate with each other and to navigate on Mars,” said Lillis.
Though Blue and Gold will journey together to Mars, they will eventually separate to orbit the planet independently. This arrangement will provide a three-dimensional view of Mars’ atmosphere as it interacts with million-mile-per-hour solar winds.
“Understanding how the solar wind drives different kinds of atmospheric escape is a key piece of the puzzle of the climate evolution of Mars,” Lillis said. “ESCAPADE gives us what you might call a stereo perspective—two different vantage points simultaneously.”
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Stay tuned as this groundbreaking mission unfolds, bringing new insights into Mars and paving the way for future human exploration.
https://www.popsci.com/science/nasa-escapade-satellite-mars/