NASA Twin ESCAPADE Spacecraft to Slingshot Past Earth Toward Mars: Powered Flybys Set for November 7 and 9
NASA announced on November 2, 2026, that its twin ESCAPADE spacecraft will each perform a powered flyby of Earth in the coming days, combining Earth's gravity with an engine burn to slingshot toward Mars. The first spacecraft will conduct its flyby and engine burn at about 5 a.m. EST on Saturday, November 7, and the second will follow at about 6 a.m. EST on Monday, November 9, 2026.
During closest approach, each spacecraft will fire its engine for about nine minutes in a trans-Mars injection burn, increasing its speed by more than 1,000 miles per hour, from about 6.3 miles per second to about 6.7 miles per second. NASA says no Mars-bound spacecraft has successfully executed a powered flyby, also known as an Oberth maneuver, before. At their closest approach, the two refrigerator-size spacecraft will pass between 600 and 1,100 miles above Earth's surface, with their engine burns taking place as they fly over southern Australia.
ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, launched in November 2025, when Earth and Mars were on opposite sides of the Sun. Instead of heading directly to Mars, the two spacecraft first flew in a kidney-bean-shaped loop around the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 and then headed back toward Earth to use the planet's gravity once the two planets returned to alignment. Along the way, the mission collected bonus science in a distant region of Earth's magnetotail that no spacecraft had directly explored before.
After the flybys, the two spacecraft will cruise for ten months and arrive at Mars on September 7 and September 9, 2027. ESCAPADE will then become the first multi-spacecraft mission to fly in formation around Mars, studying how the solar wind, a stream of material flowing from the Sun at about a million miles per hour, interacts with the Martian environment and drives atmospheric loss at the planet. In the hours before each burn, observers in the western United States may be able to spot the faint spacecraft with telescopes, and the mission team will use trajectory correction maneuvers in the days after the burns to fine-tune the course to Mars.
(Source: NASA)
Source: NASA
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：NASA 戈达德太空飞行中心发布的 ESCAPADE 探测器实施火星转移点火的示意图。来源：美国国家航空航天局（NASA），公共领域。 / Image: NASA visualization of an ESCAPADE spacecraft performing its trans-Mars injection burn. Source: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, public domain.
