NASA is preparing the first two-satellite expedition to another planet. The Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorer (ESCAPADE), two identical spacecraft designed to reach Mars, are currently scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, no earlier than Sunday (November 9).
The spacecraft will create a three-dimensional map of our space neighbor’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetic fields once they orbit the Red Planet.
The University of California, Berkeley, which is responsible for ESCAPADE, painted the spacecraft’s on-board satellites blue and gold. The spacecraft will be the first to use the new trajectory to reach Mars.
The Hohmann Transfer route, which takes between seven and eleven months, has been used by previous expeditions to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor. The trajectory required relatively limited launch windows, typically only a few weeks every 26 months, while being fuel efficient.
ESCAPADE will first go to the Lagrange point, or the place in space where the gravitational pull of the Sun and Earth is the same, rather than using a Hohmann transfer. After that, the spacecraft will return to Earth in a 12-month long bean-shaped orbit. ESCAPADE is scheduled to fire its engines in early November 2026, fly around our planet, and then use that momentum to travel to Mars.
Before reaching Mars in early 2027, the Blue and Gold satellites will activate their thrusters, data processing computers and instruments. In order to facilitate future human landings on Mars, a thorough map of the planet’s magnetic fields is required.
Mars lost its atmosphere about four billion years ago, unlike Earth. Without it, radiation from the sun’s high-energy particles regularly bombards the planet. For example, last year NASA’s Curiosity rover recorded a solar storm in one day that produced 100 days of typical Milky Way background radiation. Even in Earth’s atmosphere, solar storms are strong enough to knock out power grids, but on Mars they would be fatal to everyone without proper protection.
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According to Robert Lillis, principal investigator of ESCAPADE, measurements of space weather will be necessary to understand “the planetary system well enough to predict solar storms whose radiation could harm astronauts on the surface of Mars or in orbit.”
Previous missions have shown that Mars still retains localized magnetic fields created by its highly magnetized crust, even though it no longer has a global magnetic field like Earth. They are still capable of pushing the solar wind up to 932 miles from the planet’s surface, which can interfere with communications.
“Knowing how the ionosphere changes is going to be a really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in the radio signals that we’ll need to navigate around Mars and communicate with each other,” Lillis said.
To provide a three-dimensional perspective of the Martian atmosphere as it experiences gusts of solar wind flying at millions of miles per hour, Blue and Gold will travel to Mars together, but they will depart in separate orbits.
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