Sending something to Mars is a much more difficult process than it seems. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union made its first attempt (and it failed). nine consecutive attemptsand the US succeeded only quickly. The series of defeats ended in 1971 with the success of Sailor 9the first spacecraft to orbit another planet.
More than fifty years later, Mars remains elusive, with only seven operational orbiters and two on the surface. hiker still in operation, most operated by NASA.
NASA Getaway, a collaboration between the space agency and UC Berkeley, took place on Sunday Jeff Bezos’ blue originwill launch and attempt to add two more orbiters to the elusive club of successful Mars missions. The launch is scheduled for 14:45. AND.
On paper, the mission is simple: Blue Origin’s new Glenn rocket It will launch two Escapade orbiters on November 9, depending on weather and other factors.
Once there, the orbiters, nicknamed “Blue and Gold” after UC Berkeley’s school colors, will separate. This is where things get a little complicated. Blue and Gold will be located at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, a region of space behind Earth as seen from the Sun, where orbiters can literally stop without getting lost in space. They will stay there for a year before making a short flyby of Earth and heading to Mars. The two orbiters are expected to reach the Red Planet in November 2027.
Space agencies launch missions all the time, but few of them have the subtitle Escapade, which has not one but three underlying plots to pay attention to.
The official debut of New Glenn
NASA has chosen Blue Origin’s large New Glenn rocket for launch. New Glenn is the proverbial new kid on the block, and the Escapade mission will be the company’s first official mission to space. The function of the rocket is to launch Escapade into orbit and then return to Earth.
blue origin new Glenn sent It first entered orbit in January 2025. The mission, called NG-1 by Blue Origin, demonstrated the rocket’s ability to launch and reach space, while demonstrating the company’s Blue Ring orbital transfer vehicle. However, it did not go as planned. Upon return, New Glenn’s first stage failed to stick the landing, missed its target and sank in the Atlantic Ocean, causing an accident. FAA investigation.
During the Escapade mission, all eyes will be on whether Blue Origin will be more efficient during the landing phase this time around. Not only is this the first NASA mission for the space company owned by the CEO of online retail giant Amazon, but it will also be the second attempt at an uneventful landing of the first stage of the New Glenn rockets.
If the venture is successful, Blue Origin will join Elon Musk’s SpaceX as the sole commercial supplier. reusable launchers. This can help reduce costs and increase the frequency of space launches.
The 13 lives of the fugitive
One of the challenges of the Escapade mission is the budget. Missions to Mars are usually expensive. The Mars Exploration Rover mission began in 2003 and launched a year later. It cost just over a billion dollars, of which $744 million was spent on development and launch of the vehicle. Even cheaper companies like the 1999 bankruptcy Mars polar landerIt still costs more than $100 million.
Escapade didn’t have that budget. This is part of it NASA’s small and innovative planetary exploration missions Plan. The budget was less than $80 million, of which $55 million was allocated to UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab to build the two orbiters.
The Berkeley researchers began working on Blue and Gold in 2016 and have faced many obstacles over the years, including budget issues, the Covid-19 pandemic, supplier issues and even personal illnesses.
“I’ll put it this way: We have a presentation called ‘The Nine Lives of Getaway,’ and I think there are thirteen of us already,” Lillis says. “I could write a book about everything that could have gone wrong during the mission.”
Entry fees
In 2013, the Indian Space Research Organization launched its orbital mission to Mars, a successful attempt to deliver a satellite to the Red Planet. The total cost of the mission was $74 million, which, adjusted for inflation, was far less than any other Mars mission.
Escapade’s budget is about the same: NASA will pay Blue Origin $20 million to use the New Glenn rocket, on top of the $55 million it received from UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab to develop the two orbiters. If the mission is successful, it would be NASA’s first low-cost mission to Mars and the second successful mission of its kind.
Reducing mission costs is an important step for NASA. This would open up more possibilities for future missions to Mars, which could one day pave the way for human exploration, even if it existed. many more goals which must be met before this can happen.
UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab have successfully developed two orbiters that will spend their entire lives scanning Mars’ magnetic field to better understand its history, all on a budget that could make future missions to Mars more frequent and affordable.
Mars magnetosphere
Despite being one of Earth’s closest neighbors, there are still many questions surrounding Mars. It is quite proven that the planet At one point I got some water.. Throughout history, Mars’ magnetosphere was destroyed by solar winds, making it nearly impossible for water to exist.
Science has a limited set of data from individual orbiters over decades, and Escapade hopes to solve this problem with two consecutive orbiters so scientists can get more consistent measurements of the Martian magnetosphere. As Lillis says, Mars’ magnetosphere changes from minute to minute. Therefore, waiting for a single orbit to return to orbit leaves many of these changes unsaturated.
“With a single orbit, we could measure the solar wind conditions in advance, but then we would have to wait a few hours for the spacecraft’s orbit to take us into the upper atmosphere to measure the atmospheric escape velocity,” Lillis said. “It’s too far; we know that space weather travels through the system in just a minute or two.”
The ultimate goal of the mission is to measure and observe the interplay between the solar climate and the Martian magnetosphere. According to Lillis, the solar wind has eroded Mars’ magnetosphere, much like water erodes rocks in a river. Escapade will help scientists discover how quickly and to what extent the magnetosphere has eroded under the Sun’s continued assault.
Because space weather can be very unpredictable and existing data are too scattered in time, scientists are not entirely sure what they will find. Berkeley has simulation models that can predict things within hours. Lillis says data from the construction of two Escapade orbiters will help fill many of these gaps.
“With Escapade, we can measure cause and effect simultaneously, meaning the solar wind and the upper atmosphere at the same time,” explains Lillis. “To understand this very dynamic system, we need this cause-and-effect perspective.”
On Sunday you can watch the live broadcast of the Escapade mission launch. Blue Origin website.
