NASA’s ESCAPADE Completes Powered Earth Flybys, Now En Route to Mars
NASA’s two ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) spacecraft have each successfully completed a powered Earth flyby, using Earth’s gravity in combination with a sustained engine burn to slingshot themselves toward Mars.
Key points
- After launch in November 2025, the two ESCAPADE spacecraft looped around the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 (L2), in an “Earth-proximity” or “loiter” orbit that allowed the spacecraft to return to Earth in November 2026 and use our planet’s gravity to slingshot themselves to Mars.
- In the mission operations center at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), Robert Lillis, ESCAPADE’s principal investigator (bottom right), awaits a signal after the first spacecraft performed an engine burn that initiated a powered Earth gravity assist on Nov.
- Advanced Space/Matt Bolliger “With this loiter orbit and Earth flyby, ESCAPADE is pioneering a new strategy for getting to Mars,” said Jeff Parker of Advanced Space, lead mission designer.
“This is the first time NASA has used a powered Earth flyby to propel a spacecraft toward Mars, and we’ve now executed this maneuver twice, flawlessly, in just two days,” said Asal Naseri, acting associate flight director for the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Additional details
- To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video The ESCAPADE mission is pioneering a unique path to get to Mars.
- So instead of heading straight for the Red Planet, as most other Mars missions have done, both spacecraft entered a “loiter” or “Earth-proximity” orbit.
- Then they headed back toward Earth to perform this gravitational slingshot maneuver around our planet once Earth and Mars were favorably aligned.
- They charted a first-of-its-kind, kidney-bean-shaped course around a place in space about a million miles from Earth called Lagrange point 2, which is a gravitational balancing point on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun.
- Once in orbit around Mars, the two spacecraft will fly in formation to study how a million-mile-per-hour stream of material flowing from the Sun, known as the solar wind, interacts with the Martian environment and how that drives atmospheric loss at Mars.
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