Follow Up: ESCAPADE Twin Spacecraft Complete Earth Flyby Burns, Gold on Nov 9, Both Now Headed to Mars for September 2027 Arrival
UC Berkeley announced on November 9 that the second spacecraft of NASA's ESCAPADE mission, Gold, has completed its Earth powered flyby burn, joining its twin Blue on the way to Mars. Both spacecraft have now departed Earth.
According to Berkeley, Blue fired its engines for more than nine minutes starting at 5 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, November 7, at an altitude of about 1,700 kilometers. Gold performed a similar maneuver at 6 a.m. Eastern on Monday, November 9, at about 1,000 kilometers.
It is the first successful Earth powered gravity assist for a deep space mission. Using engine burns together with Earth's gravity, the pair changed course onto a transfer trajectory toward Mars.
The ESCAPADE twins launched on November 13, 2025 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and spent about a year loitering near the Earth Sun L2 region while waiting for this flyby window.
The spacecraft are scheduled to reach Mars in September 2027. Blue will perform an orbit insertion burn of about 11 minutes on September 9, with Gold following two days later.
Science operations are expected to begin in June 2028. The pair will first fly in formation, then split into different orbits for a five month joint campaign.
ESCAPADE's science goal is to study how the solar wind interacts with Mars. The solar wind is a stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun at about one million miles per hour, and the mission will measure how it strips the Martian atmosphere, helping explain the planet's long term atmospheric loss.
The principal investigator is Rob Lillis, associate director for planetary science at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. NASA program scientist Michele Cash described the mission's place in heliophysics research in the release.
ESCAPADE is funded by NASA's Heliophysics Division under the SIMPLEx program. Partners include Rocket Lab, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Advanced Space and Blue Origin.
On July 3, 2026, Blue photographed Earth and the Moon together from 584,600 kilometers away, an image NASA and Berkeley released earlier.
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Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons 词条主图：Spacecraft
