NASA's twin ESCAPADE probes complete powered Earth flybys and head for Mars

Both of NASA's ESCAPADE spacecraft have swung past Earth and fired their engines toward Mars, the agency said on November 9, 2026. Each made what NASA calls a powered flyby, letting Earth's gravity bend and speed its path while its engine fired for roughly nine minutes at the point of closest approach. With the two maneuvers done, NASA says the pair are on target to reach Mars in September 2027.

This is the first time NASA has used a powered Earth flyby to propel a spacecraft toward Mars, and we've now executed this maneuver twice, flawlessly, in just two days.

Two burns, two days apart

At 5 a.m. EST on November 7, about 1,000 miles above the surface, the first probe finished its pass of closest approach and its trans-Mars injection burn, the maneuver that locks in its course for Mars. Its twin did the same at 6 a.m. EST on November 9, about 650 miles up. Those times are 10:00 and 11:00 UTC by our conversion.

By our comparison, both altitudes fall within the plan NASA published on November 2, which put closest approach between 600 and 1,100 miles and had the burns beginning at 4:51 a.m. and 5:51 a.m. EST. The same post forecast a gain of more than 1,000 miles per hour from each burn, to roughly 6.7 miles per second. NASA's November 9 article gives no speeds achieved, and the earlier post said that confirming how accurately the probes are pointed at Mars would take several days once the burns were done.

Why they went the long way

When ESCAPADE left Cape Canaveral on November 13, 2025, Earth and Mars were out of the alignment that allows a direct trip, which NASA says comes only every 26 months. Rather than wait, the pair spent almost a year looping around Lagrange point 2, about a million miles out, and returned for this month's flybys.

"This method provides the flexibility to launch almost anytime and then use Earth's gravity to get a boost to Mars, rather than waiting every two years to launch there directly when the planets are aligned," said Jeff Parker of Advanced Space, the mission's lead designer.

Ten months to Mars, then the science

The cruise lasts about 10 months, and trajectory correction maneuvers along the way will tighten the aim. The two arrivals at Mars come two days apart, and each needs an engine firing of about 11 minutes to brake into orbit. NASA's mission page says the pair must finish lowering their orbits before solar conjunction interrupts communications in late 2027. The agency expects science operations to begin in June 2028.

In the first campaign the two craft trail each other along a single orbit, measuring how conditions around the planet vary over time and from place to place. Six months on, their orbits diverge: one samples the solar wind before it reaches Mars while the other, nearer the planet, measures the response at the same moment. NASA plans five months for that second campaign. The aim is to work out how the solar wind, the Sun's outflow of material, drives the escape of the Martian atmosphere.

"This will be the first science mission to choreograph two orbiters around Mars," said the principal investigator, Rob Lillis of the University of California, Berkeley, whose Space Sciences Laboratory leads the mission. Each spacecraft weighs 209 kilograms (460 pounds) dry and 535 kilograms (1,179 pounds) fueled, according to NASA.

What comes next

The pair already took some science readings on repeated passes through Earth's magnetotail during the loiter orbit, and NASA says they can study the solar wind in the space between the two planets during the cruise. ESCAPADE is a SIMPLEx mission, NASA's line of lower-budget planetary projects, paid for by the agency's Heliophysics Division. Its partners include Rocket Lab, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Advanced Space and Blue Origin. The next milestones are the cruise's course corrections and the arrival burns in September 2027.