ESCAPADE Visits the Distant Magnetotail

  • Released Thursday, February 26, 2026
  • Last updated Friday, February 27, 2026 at 4:54 PM EST
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Launched on Nov. 13, 2025, NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission 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.

But before heading to Mars, the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft are first passing through a distant part of Earth’s magnetotail, the part of our planet’s magnetic field that extends away from the Sun, pushed back by the stream of particles from the Sun known as the solar wind.

The two ESCAPADE spacecraft are the first to travel through this distant part of Earth’s magnetotail.

This visualization uses data collected by other spacecraft in the inner part of Earth's magnetotail, but we do not yet have measurements for the previously unexplored region of the magnetotail that ESCAPADE will fly through. Therefore, the distant part of the magnetotail that ESCAPADE will traverse does not appear in the visualization.

This visualization shows a computer model of Earth's magnetotail evolving over the course of 8 hours, colored by temperature. The cyan trails show where the ESCAPADE spacecraft will be flying on March 4, 2026.

Credits

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NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

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Related papers

Generation of field-aligned currents during substorm expansion: An update

Ebihara, Y., T. Tanaka, Generation of field-aligned currents during substorm expansion: An update, Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 128, e2022JA031011, https://www.doi.org/10.1029/2022JA031011 (2023).

DOI: 10.1029/2022JA031011

This paper can be found at: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022JA031011

Datasets used

  • REPPU

    ID: 1270
    Type: Model

    Credit: Tanaka, T., Nakamizo, A., Yoshikawa, A., Fujita, S., Shinagawa, H., Shimazu, H., et al. Substorm convection and current system deduced from the global simulation. Journal of Geophysical Research, 115(A5), A05220. https://www.doi.org/10.1029/2009JA014676 (2010).

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Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

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This page was originally published on Thursday, February 26, 2026.
This page was last updated on Friday, February 27, 2026 at 4:54 PM EST.