The POT is preparing to launch this Sunday from Florida the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, which will send two identical satellites that will study the interaction between the solar wind and the magnetic field of Mars.
The results will help scientists understand how and when Mars lost its atmosphere and provide key information about the conditions future astronauts traveling or settling there would face.
The initiative will allow obtaining an unprecedented three-dimensional view of the magnetosphere and ionosphere of the red planet, explained the US space agency.
Led by the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley), the mission marks the first planetary project led by this institution.
“Understanding how the ionosphere varies will be essential to correct distortions in the radio signals that we will need to communicate and navigate on Mars,” explained Robert Lillis, principal investigator of ESCAPADE.
The satellites, Blue and Gold, will reach Mars in 2027 and will be operated from UC Berkeley’s mission control center.
The scientific instruments were designed and built in partnership with other institutions, while the ships were developed by Rocket Lab USA and will be launched aboard a New Glenn rocket, from Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ company, in what will be the second mission of this space vehicle.
According to Lillis, a scientist at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, ESCAPADE will also help predict solar storms that could endanger the crew because their radiation “could harm astronauts on the surface or in orbit of Mars.”
The mission will also test a new interplanetary trajectory that could transform future trips to the Red Planet by making them more flexible and frequent.
Instead of using the traditional Hohmann transfer maneuver – which restricts launches to a window of a few weeks every 26 months – the mission will first head to a Lagrange point before heading to Mars.
“Can we launch to Mars when the planets are not aligned? ESCAPADE is paving the way for that,” said Jeffrey Parker of Advanced Space LLC, a partner in the project.
The mission will offer for the first time a “stereo” view, that is, two identical satellites that will observe the same phenomenon at the same time from different points in space.
The idea is to observe how the solar wind affects the upper atmosphere of Mars, key to understanding the loss of water and atmospheric gases that transformed its climate billions of years ago.
“To understand how the solar wind drives different types of atmospheric exhaust we need a double perspective – two simultaneous points of view – and that is exactly what ESCAPADE will provide us,” explained Lillis.
Researchers hope the data will help determine what happened to the water that once flowed on Mars and whether it can still be found beneath the surface.
“We know that Mars had a dense atmosphere in the past, but today it is very thin. The atmosphere can only disappear in two ways: seeping into the subsurface or escaping into space, and this last process has been a key factor in the evolution of the planet,” said space physicist Shaoxui Xu, deputy director of the mission.
ESCAPADE, with a total cost of $49 million, also represents a new way of exploring space: smaller, lower-cost missions, greater private sector participation and “a greater tolerance for risk,” Lillis concluded.
The mission includes instruments designed by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida (USA) to analyze how the solar wind interacts with the magnetic environment of Mars and how this interaction drives the planet’s atmospheric escape.
This atmospheric erosion refers to the gradual loss of gases from a planet’s atmosphere to outer space, a phenomenon essential to understanding how Mars went from a planet with liquid water millions of years ago to a cold, arid planet today.
The mission is scheduled to take off aboard the New Glenn rocket this Sunday from Launch Complex 36 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (Florida), weather conditions permitting.