ESCAPADE Prepares for Flight (2025)

The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, will use two identical spacecraft to investigate how the solar wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic environment and how this interaction drives the planet’s atmospheric escape. The first multi-spacecraft orbital science mission to the Red Planet, ESCAPADE’s twin orbiters will take simultaneous observations from different locations around Mars to reveal the planet’s real-time response to space weather and how the Martian magnetosphere changes over time.

The ESCAPADE mission is being carried into orbit on the second launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket (NG-2) and is scheduled to launch in November 2025 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. New Glenn is a single-configuration, heavy-lift orbital launch vehicle capable of routinely carrying both spacecraft and people to low Earth orbits, geostationary transfer orbits, cislunar orbits (between Earth and the Moon), and beyond via Earth-departure orbits like the one required for ESCAPADE. The vehicle is named after John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit Earth.

The ESCAPADE mission is managed by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, with key partners Rocket Lab, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Advanced Space LLC, and Blue Origin.