NASA’s upcoming Mars mission is about to deliver a double impact. This weekend, a pair of identical satellites will be launched to uncover how the Red Planet lost its once-thick atmosphere and liquid water—an ancient mystery that could explain how Mars evolved from a habitable world into the icy desert we know today.
Scheduled to launch no earlier than Sunday (Nov. 9) aboard Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the $80 million ESCAPADE mission—short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers—will send two twin probes, nicknamed Blue and Gold, to orbit Mars side by side. This marks NASA’s first-ever dual-satellite mission to another planet, aiming to create a 3D picture of how the solar wind strips away Martian air.
“To understand how the solar wind drives different kinds of atmospheric escape is a key piece of the puzzle of Mars’ climate evolution,” said Robert Lillis, principal investigator for ESCAPADE and associate director for planetary science at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. “ESCAPADE gives us what you might call a stereo perspective—two different vantage points simultaneously.”
Geologic evidence such as ancient river valleys and minerals shows that Mars once had liquid water and a much thicker atmosphere. However, around four billion years ago, its protective magnetic field began to fade. Without it, solar wind—streams of charged particles from the sun—slowly stripped away the Martian atmosphere, leaving behind a thin remnant less than 1% as dense as Earth’s.
Previous NASA missions like Mars Global Surveyor, MAVEN, and the Emirates Mars Mission Hope confirmed that while Mars no longer has a global magnetic field, it retains localized magnetic “bubbles” trapped in its crust. But with only one spacecraft in orbit at a time, scientists could only observe a single region every few hours.
With ESCAPADE, researchers will now be able to monitor variations in Mars’ upper atmosphere every two to thirty minutes, offering unprecedented detail of how solar energy interacts with Martian air.
After reaching Mars in September 2027, the twin satellites will spend seven months adjusting their orbits before flying in formation—“like a pair of pearls on a string”—coming as close as 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the surface. For the first six months, they will make coordinated observations, followed by separate orbits to construct a full 3D map of Mars’ atmospheric loss process.
Over roughly 11 months of operations, ESCAPADE will tackle three main questions:
- How Mars’ magnetic “bubble” is shaped.
- How solar energy interacts with that magnetic field.
- How particles move in and out of the Martian atmosphere.
Each probe, about the size of a copy machine, carries identical instruments: electrostatic analyzers from UC Berkeley to track charged particles, magnetometers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to measure magnetic fields, and plasma sensors from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University to study plasma behavior. Cameras built by Northern Arizona University students will capture images of Mars—and possibly its elusive green auroras.
ESCAPADE will also test a new route to Mars. Instead of flying directly, the satellites will first travel to a Lagrange point, a gravitational sweet spot between Earth and the Sun, where they’ll orbit for a year before slingshotting toward Mars in 2026. This longer but flexible path could make future missions less dependent on the narrow, once-every-two-years Mars launch windows.
Understanding how solar radiation interacts with Mars’ ionosphere could also benefit future explorers. Since radio waves can bounce off this layer, mapping its behavior is vital for communication and navigation. The mission’s findings may even hint at the possibility of liquid water beneath Mars’ surface, a theory supported by recent seismic data from NASA’s InSight lander—and a crucial clue for future human settlement.
“It’s definitely going to be a challenge to establish a human colony on Mars,” Lillis said. “But humans are tenacious, right?”