ESCAPADE: two Earth flybys to launch the probes toward Mars
· BehindLines newsroom
NASA’s two ESCAPADE spacecraft have each completed a powered flyby of Earth, combining the planet’s gravity with a long engine firing to fling themselves toward Mars. The first made its closest approach on 7 November at about 5 a.m. (East Coast time in the United States), the second two days later, on 9 November at about 6 a.m. NASA says they are on course to arrive at the Red Planet in September 2027.
An unusual route
Launched from Florida on 13 November 2025, the two spacecraft did not head straight for Mars, because Earth and Mars were then on opposite sides of the Sun. They first traced a bean-shaped waiting orbit around the Lagrange point L2, about 1.6 million kilometres from Earth, before returning toward our planet. According to NASA, this is the first time it has used a powered Earth flyby to send a spacecraft to Mars.
What happened
Each spacecraft made a low-altitude pass, about 1,600 km for the first and 1,050 km for the second (converted from the 1,000 and 650 miles given by NASA). Each fired its engine for about nine minutes: this thrust, called trans-Mars injection, commits the craft to its route. Jeff Parker, the mission designer at Advanced Space, sees a method that allows departure almost at any time, instead of waiting every two years for the planets to align.
What remains to be done
The journey takes ten months. The Mars orbit insertion manoeuvres are planned for 7 and 9 September 2027, with a burn of about eleven minutes for each spacecraft. Science operations are due to begin in June 2028. The two craft will then study how the solar wind interacts with Mars’s environment and drives the loss of its atmosphere. The principal investigator, from the University of California, Berkeley, whose Space Sciences Laboratory leads the mission, sees it as the first science mission to coordinate two orbiters around Mars.
These dates remain plans: NASA describes a successful flyby, not an arrival.