Blue Origin’s highly effective New Glenn rocket will launch a NASA mission to Mars this weekend, and you may watch the motion dwell.
The twin ESCAPADE Mars probes are scheduled to carry off atop the partially reusable New Glenn from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Sunday (Nov. 9), throughout a 2.5-hour window that opens at 2:45 p.m. EDT (1945 GMT).
You can watch the launch — the second-ever for New Glenn — live via Blue Origin, which was based by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Space.com will carry the feed as nicely, if the corporate makes it accessible.
The $80 million ESCAPADE mission consists of two spacecraft, which were built by Rocket Lab and will be operated for NASA by the University of California, Berkeley. That latter fact explains the duo’s names — Blue and Gold, which are UC-Berkeley’s school colors.
New Glenn will launch Blue and Gold toward the Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), a gravitationally stable spot about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) beyond our planet.
The pair will hang out there for 12 months while studying space weather. They’ll loop by Earth in November 2026, getting a gravitational boost from our planet to head out to Mars, which they’ll reach about 10 months later.
This complex trajectory is required by orbital dynamics: Earth and Mars align just once every 26 months for efficient interplanetary travel, and the next such window opens in late 2026.
After they reach the Red Planet, the ESCAPADE probes will spend about seven months lowering themselves into precisely aligned orbits, then gather data for at least 11 months.
The orbiters will “fly in formation to map the magnetic fields, upper atmosphere and ionosphere of Mars in 3D, providing the first stereo view of the Red Planet’s unique near-space environment,” UC-Berkeley wrote in a mission description.
“What they find will help scientists understand how and when Mars lost its atmosphere and provide key information about conditions on the planet that could affect people who land or settle on Mars,” the college added.
Sunday’s launch would be the second thus far for New Glenn, which might haul about 50 tons (45 metric tons) of payload to low Earth orbit.
The rocket debuted with a profitable check flight on Jan. 16, 2025, which despatched a prototype model of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring spacecraft platform to orbit.
The firm failed in its try and land New Glenn’s first stage on a ship at sea that day. It will do that landmark maneuver once more on Sunday, so there will probably be plenty of motion for house followers to observe.