NASA Launches ESCAPADE Twins
NASA launched two ESCAPADE spacecraft to study how the solar wind strips Mars' atmosphere — a mission that leans on radiation-hardened embedded systems and real-time telemetry, reported. The twin-satellite approach will yield new datasets on atmospheric loss and tests of robust spacecraft avionics.
ESCAPADE’s two probes — Blue and Gold — rode Blue Origin’s New Glenn into space on Nov. 13, 2025 (3:55 p.m. EST) from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, with stage separation and spacecraft deployment ~33 minutes after liftoff. nasa.gov Both spacecraft were designed and assembled on Rocket Lab’s Explorer-class bus at Rocket Lab’s Long Beach Space Systems facility, with the program moving from contract award to launch in roughly 3.5 years. rocketlabcorp.com Each orbiter carries the EMAG magnetometer (DC fields up to ~1,000 nT), an EESA electrostatic analyzer that measures suprathermal ions from ~2 eV–20 keV and electrons from ~3–10 keV, plus an ELP Langmuir probe for local plasma density and potential. new.nextspaceflight.com The twin-stack architecture totals ~1,070 kg at launch (≈535 kg per spacecraft) with nominal science-mode power around 128 W and cruise/peak numbers near 288 W, and orbital insertion at Mars is planned for 2027. en.wikipedia.org Onboard telemetry has already been captured and decoded by ground observers: X‑band downlinks recorded by the Allen Telescope Array revealed human-readable ASCII log messages in early post‑launch passes, giving engineers community access to low‑latency health and status streams. destevez.net ESCAPADE was flown under NASA’s SIMPLEx cost-and-risk posture as a Class D, low‑cost mission (budget cited under $80M in mission materials), favoring “flight‑proven” commercial subsystems and Rocket Lab’s standard flight computers rather than bespoke high‑cost bespoke architectures. ssl.berkeley.edu
