NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars — twin UC Berkeley satellites dubbed Blue and Gold — will launch in early November

The first dual-satellite mission to a different planet, NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers), is scheduled for launch no sooner than Sunday, Nov. 9, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The two equivalent spacecraft are managed and operated by the University of California, Berkeley, and can fly in formation to map the magnetic fields, higher ambiance and ionosphere of Mars in 3D, offering the primary stereo view of the Red Planet’s distinctive near-space atmosphere.

What they discover will assist scientists perceive how and when Mars misplaced its ambiance and supply key details about situations on the planet that might have an effect on individuals who land or choose Mars.

“Understanding how the ionosphere varies will be a really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in radio signals that we will need to communicate with each other and to navigate on Mars,” mentioned ESCAPADE principal investigator Robert Lillis of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL).

The satellite tv for pc pair, which is able to arrive at Mars in 2027, have been nicknamed Blue and Gold in honor of UC Berkeley’s faculty colours. They will probably be operated from SSL’s mission operations middle (MOC) within the hills above the Berkeley campus. The science devices, deployable booms and information processing computer systems had been constructed by UC Berkeley and its companions, whereas the ESCAPADE spacecraft had been constructed by Rocket Lab USA, headquartered in Long Beach, California. The NASA mission will probably be carried into house by a New Glenn rocket constructed by Blue Origin, headquartered in Kent, Washington.

Mapping the planet’s magnetic fields and their response to house climate is vital as a result of Mars has neither a worldwide magnetic area like Earth’s, nor a thick ambiance to protect the floor from damaging photo voltaic storms. As a outcome, anybody dwelling on the floor should shield themselves from the high-energy particle radiation that damages DNA, rising the danger of most cancers. A background radiation stage from our Milky Way galaxy is at all times current on Mars, Lillis mentioned, however final 12 months NASA’s Curiosity rover documented an intense photo voltaic storm that delivered in at some point the equal of 100 days of this “normal” background.

“We will be making the space weather measurements we need to understand the system well enough to forecast solar storms whose radiation could harm astronauts on the surface of Mars or in orbit,” Lillis mentioned.

Aside from its predominant missions, ESCAPADE will even pioneer a brand new route or trajectory to Mars. Typically, missions to Mars are launched inside a decent window — only a few weeks lengthy each 26 months — that permits the spacecraft to take probably the most fuel-efficient route: an elliptical path that permits the spacecraft to exit Earth’s orbit and insert into Mars’ orbit at simply the correct time to catch the Red Planet because it hurtles by. Trajectories sometimes take between seven and 11 months. All Mars missions so far have used this route, known as a Hohmann Transfer, which has restricted launches to this once-every-two-years alignment between Earth and Mars.

ESCAPADE will as a substitute head first to a Lagrange level — a spot the place the gravitational pull of the solar and Earth are equal — and loop round it in a lazy, 12-month kidney bean-shaped orbit that finally brings it again towards Earth in early November 2026. At its closest method, ESCAPADE will hearth its engines to slingshot round Earth and head out to satisfy Mars throughout its biannual alignment with Earth.

If people plan to settle Mars sooner or later, a whole lot to 1000’s of crewed and uncrewed ships might want to head out throughout each alignment, Lillis mentioned. Since Earth has a restricted variety of launch pads and climate and technical delays are frequent, the versatile trajectory ESCAPADE will pioneer might enable all these spacecraft to launch over many months, “queueing up” earlier than zipping off to Mars throughout the planetary alignment. 

“Can we launch to Mars when the planets are not aligned? ESCAPADE is paving the way for that,” mentioned Jeffrey Parker of Advanced Space LLC, considered one of NASA’s companions on ESCAPADE, at a convention earlier this 12 months.

Science targets

Experiments constructed at UC Berkeley have been going to Mars for almost 60 years, unveiling its ambiance, magnetic fields and house climate to grasp what formed the planet we see immediately. Berkeley constructed devices for NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor mission, which launched in 1996 and found that Mars misplaced its world magnetic area about 4 billion years in the past. Berkeley now has devices on two ongoing missions — NASA’s MAVEN, launched in 2013, and the Emirates Mars Mission Hope probe, launched in 2020 — which might be nonetheless monitoring Mars’ ambiance, and discovering new kinds of aurora.

These missions have proven that, whereas Mars lacks a worldwide magnetic area like Earth’s, it does have localized magnetic fields attributable to its strongly magnetized crust. These “crustal fields” are the remnant of a long-gone world magnetic area that magnetized rocks as they cooled or had been altered by water.

“Mars has this patchy crustal magnetism that results in magnetic fields that are locally strong though generally far weaker than Earth’s field,” Lillis mentioned. “They’re effective at pushing the solar wind away up to 1,500 km away from the surface.”

As the latest Berkeley-led mission, ESCAPADE’s two probes will fly in numerous orbits across the planet, offering a 3D view of how the Martian ambiance responds to adjustments within the photo voltaic wind, a million-mile-per-hour, gusty stream of charged particles from the solar. The purpose is to grasp higher how the photo voltaic wind energizes the particles and helps them escape into house. The escape of water and different atmospheric gases over the previous 4 billion years has led to a skinny, wispy ambiance, lower than 1% the density of Earth’s.

“To understand how the solar wind drives different kinds of atmospheric escape is a key piece of the puzzle of the climate evolution of Mars. ESCAPADE gives us what you might call a stereo perspective — two different vantage points simultaneously,” Lillis mentioned.

The information might assist decide what occurred to the water that when stuffed lakes and rivers on Mars, a minimum of episodically, up till 2 billion years in the past, and whether or not it’s nonetheless out there underground to be tapped by future Martian colonists.

“The geological evidence shows that Mars once had water on it, and in order to keep the water, you need a thick atmosphere,” mentioned house physicist Shaoxui Xu, deputy principal investigator for the mission. “So we know that there was a thick enough atmosphere on Mars once upon a time, but now it is very tenuous. There are only two ways for atmosphere to leave — either go into the ground or escape to space, and there are a lot of studies showing that escape has been a very significant contributor to the evolution of the atmosphere.”

Understanding how the photo voltaic wind impacts the higher ambiance, or ionosphere, additionally has implications for communications on the planet floor, since bouncing radio alerts off the ionosphere permits communication over the horizon.

A brand new means of doing issues

Lillis and colleagues have been engaged on ESCAPADE since 2016, when NASA supplied seed cash for an idea research. That resulted within the proposal to NASA’s SIMPLEx program, or Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program, in 2018, which aimed to fund missions for a fraction of the price of typical missions. ESCAPADE was chosen for funding in 2019. While SSL engineers designed and constructed the experiments, Rocket Lab USA, a worldwide chief in launch companies and house techniques, designed and constructed the spacecraft to hold the devices and built-in and examined them on the firm’s advanced in Long Beach. The price to ship the spacecraft to the launchpad in 2024 was $49 million.

“ESCAPADE represents a new way of doing things, with much lower cost, more commercial involvement, and a somewhat higher risk tolerance,” Lillis mentioned. “The reliability of individual components and subsystems has improved, so it’s possible to send two spacecraft to Mars for roughly one-tenth of what it would have cost 10 or 15 years ago.”

The mission was initially scheduled to launch throughout a planetary alignment window within the fall of 2024 on board the inaugural launch of the New Glenn rocket. When that was delayed past the temporary planetary alignment window, ESCAPADE was rescheduled for the second flight of New Glenn this fall and a very new trajectory to Mars.

Once the satellites arrive at Mars, they are going to take about seven months to settle into decrease orbits which might be synchronized “so that they essentially are in the same orbit, following each other like a pair of pearls on a string,” Lillis mentioned.

“That’s important scientifically because it lets us monitor the short timescale variability of the system. We don’t know what it is right now because the missions that have gone before, like MAVEN and Europe’s Mars Express, have had to wait until the following orbit, about four or five hours later, to see what conditions are like in a particular region,” Lillis mentioned. “When we have two spacecraft crossing those regions in quick succession, we can monitor how those regions vary on timescales as short as two minutes and up to 30 minutes. Before we had to wait for several hours. So this will allow us to really make measurements we’ve never made before, and to characterize a very dynamic system in a way we couldn’t characterize it before.”

The UC Berkeley devices onboard embrace two electrostatic analyzers to measure the flux and energies of particles — each ionized atoms and electrons — which might be escaping Mars.

“We’ll know which direction (the particles) are going and what energies they have, which tells us if they’re coming back to Mars or if they are able to leave Mars,” mentioned Gwen Hanley, a member of the science crew at SSL.

“We can learn a lot about the way that particles are flowing and the electric fields that accelerate ions and electrons and the local Mars environment,” added Phyllis Whittlesey, science lead for the electron electrostatic analyzer.

Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center contributed a magnetic area detector, whereas researchers at Florida’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University constructed a tool to measure the charged particles, or plasma, across the spacecraft. An onboard digital camera from Northern Arizona University will {photograph} mud and the planet’s aurora.

For all his curiosity in Mars, Lillis admits that he wouldn’t wish to go to. With extraordinarily low atmospheric strain, your blood would boil with out a strain swimsuit, he mentioned. And individuals would probably need to stay and work underground a lot of the day to reduce publicity to the cosmic radiation hitting the floor.

“It is definitely going to be a challenge to establish a human settlement on Mars,” he mentioned. “But, you know, humans are tenacious, right?”

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