NASA's twin ESCAPADE Mars probes slingshot around Earth in unprecedented double 'gravity assist'
After launching in November 2025, the twin ESCAPADE probes looped around the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 (L2), in a "loiter" orbit that returned them to Earth in November 2026 where they used our planet's gravity to slingshot themselves to Mars.
Key points
- "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," Asal Naseri, acting associate flight director for NASA's Heliophysics Division said in a statement.
- ESCAPADE was meant to launch in October 2024, when Earth and Mars were favorably aligned, but delays with the New Glenn rocket forced the mission to sit out the precious launch window.
- (Image credit: Advanced Space/Matt Bolliger) Once they arrived, however, the twin probes faced a major hurdle: Each had to perfectly execute an engine burn within Earth's gravity well.
It called for the twin probes to loop through that trajectory to be back at Earth in early November 2026, ready to continue on to Mars.
Additional details
- The maneuver is similar to the slingshot flybys that spacecraft regularly conduct to adjust their trajectories — but here, the probes had to fire their engines to amp up the effect of the burn rather than acting alone.
- Conveniently, the two ESCAPADE spacecraft traveled through the structure over the course of about 10 days early last year at a much greater distance from Earth — some 1.19 million miles (1.91 million km) away.
- Now, they are back in Earth's neighborhood where they tackled a crucial engine burn unusually close to Earth that — if all goes well — will set them on track for Mars.
- All are tailored for studying the strange magnetic field of Mars, which is created both globally by charged particles from the sun interacting with the atmosphere and locally by areas of highly magnetic crust.
- (Image credit: Rocket Lab USA/UC Berkeley) A second shot at the magnetotail came over the summer, when the spacecraft were much closer to Earth but the moon was also passing through the magnetic structure.
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