Twins Blastoff for Mars

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Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket just launched an interplanetary mission on its second-ever flight — and aced an epic landing at sea.

NASA's two-spacecraft ESCAPADE Mars mission is now en route to the Red Planet, thanks to a successful liftoff today (Nov. 13) of New Glenn, Blue Origin's next-generation heavy-lift launch vehicle. The countdown clock hit zero at 3:45 p.m. EST (2045 GMT) this afternoon, as the rocket began rising off its Blue Origin pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, on Florida's Space Coast.

"I think ESCAPADE is really exciting because it's a trailblazer, a pathfinder if you will, for what we think is a new way of doing space science missions," ESCAPADE Principal Investigator Robert Lillis, of the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, told reporters during a press briefing on Saturday (Nov. 8).
ESCAPADE — short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers — is a first-of-its-kind mission to send two commercially built probes that will study how Mars, which once had liquid water on its surface, lost its atmosphere over time to become the arid Red Planet we know today. Built by Rocket Lab for NASA and UC Berkeley, the mission costs less than $80 million — much less than the agency's flagship Mars missions in the past.

Blue Origin launched ESCAPADE from its Launch Complex 36 pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The flight continued as planned, with main engine cutoff and stage separation occurring about three minutes after liftoff.

The rocket's second stage continued onward to deliver ESCAPADE into space, while New Glenn's first stage began a series of deceleration burns to attempt a landing on Blue Origin's recovery ship "Jacklyn," which was waiting about 375 miles (604 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.
Blue Origin is now the second company in history to recover a rocket during an operational flight. This practice has become the norm for SpaceX, which has so mastered landing and reusing its Falcon 9 rocket that boosters launching for the first time are now a rarity.

The landing wasn't the main goal of today's mission, of course; that would be sending the ESCAPADE probes successfully on their way. And that indeed happened: The duo deployed on schedule over a 30-second span beginning about 33.5 minutes after liftoff.

"ESCAPADE, you are headed to Mars!" Cornell said after the second spacecraft separated from New Glenn's upper stage.

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A Mars mission like no other​

ESCAPADE is the first Mars mission to launch in more than five years. The most recent one, NASA's Perseverance rover (and ride-along Ingenuity helicopter) lifted off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in July 2020.

NASA officials, however, were unable to participate in prelaunch media events for ESCAPADE because of the just-ended government shutdown, which was the longest in U.S. history at more than 40 days. Blue Origin was particularly hopeful for an on-time launch Sunday (Nov. 9) after the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday (Nov. 7) announced a halt to daytime commercial rocket launches to reduce strain and safety risks for air traffic controllers. That halt began on Nov. 10, the first of two planned backup launch days for ESCAPADE

A Sunday launch wasn't in the cards; bad weather forced a scrub that day, and Blue Origin targeted Wednesday — the same day the shutdown ended — after getting a waiver from the FAA for a daytime launch. Wednesday's try was thwarted by a powerful solar storm, however, so the company recalibrated for another try today.
Those were just the latest delays. New Glenn was initially scheduled to launch ESCAPADE on its debut mission (then scheduled for October 2024), but NASA decided to delay liftoff until the rocket had at least one successful launch under its belt in order to avoid potentially significant cost overruns in the event of a long delay. That delay added up to $7 million to the mission's overall cost for the university, Dave Curtis, ESCAPADE project manager at Berkeley, said on Saturday.

Now, just over a year after that launch delay decision, the twin Mars orbiters are headed to their destination — sort of.

New Glenn launched the orbiter duo toward the Earth-sun Lagrange point 2, an area of gravitational stability about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet. ESCAPADE will stay there for a year before looping back for a close pass of Earth in November 2026, at which point it will fire up its engines for a slingshot toward Mars — a novel trajectory that allowed the mission to launch outside the typical Earth-Mars transfer window, which opens just once every 26 months. (The next such opening comes in late 2026.)

"We build a high delta V system that not only cruises to Mars and performs the Mars orbit insertion maneuver, but first climbs out of the Earth's gravity well, eliminating the need for Mars direct transfer from the launch vehicle, significantly increasing the available launch options," Richard French, Rocket Lab's vice president of business development and strategy, told reporters on Saturday.
If all goes well, ESCAPADE will leave its Lagrange point 2 loiter spot in November 2026 and arrive in orbit around the Red Planet in September 2027. Once there, mission leads at the University of California, Berkeley will operate the orbiters, dubbed Blue and Gold (for the university's colors), for about 11 months.

The probes will collect data with four different science instruments (which are identical on both of them). The science team will use this information to construct a 3D map of the environment around Mars to study how the solar wind contributes to the depletion of Mars' atmosphere, among other tasks.

"The geological evidence shows that Mars once had water on it, and in order to keep the water, you need a thick atmosphere,” ESCAPADE Deputy Principal Investigator Shaosui Xu, a space physicist at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, said in a statement.

"So we know that there was a thick enough atmosphere on Mars once upon a time, but now it is very tenuous," Xu added. "There are only two ways for atmosphere to leave — either go into the ground or escape to space, and there are a lot of studies showing that escape has been a very significant contributor to the evolution of the atmosphere."

Lillis said the misson team is particularly excited because ESCAPADE will study Mars in tandem with other spacecraft already at the Red Planet. NASA's MAVEN orbiter has been closely studying the planet's atmosphere since its arrival there in 2014. Other spacecraft at Mars include NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers and two European orbiters — Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. And Japan's planned Mars Moons Explorer mission will track the solar wind at the Martian moon Phobos, giving yet another eye on space weather at the Red Planet.

"This is a really exciting time where we're going to have all these assets at Mars," Lillis said.

 

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