NASA’s Escapade mission may finally reveal how the Martian atmosphere works

Sending anything to Mars is a much harder process than it seems. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union tried (and failed) in its first attempt Nine consecutive attemptsThe United States was only able to succeed in rapid flights. The losing streak in 1971 ended successfully Mariner 9the first spacecraft to orbit another planet.

More than 50 years later, Mars remains difficult to reach, with only seven operational orbiters and two on its surface. Rovers They are still operational, mostly operated by NASA.

On Sunday, NASA launched Escapade, a collaborative effort between the space agency, UC Berkeley and the University of California Jeff Bezos Original Bluewill launch and attempt to add two more orbiters to the club of successful missions to elusive Mars. Liftoff is scheduled to take place at 2:45 p.m. ET.

The task is simple on paper: Blue Origin’s new Glenn rocket The spacecraft will launch two Escapade orbiters into space 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. The blue and gold will be located at the L2 Earth-Sun Lagrange Point, the part of space beyond Earth when viewed from the Sun, where orbiters can literally hang out without getting lost in space. They will stay there for a year before making a quick flyby around Earth and departing for Mars. The dual orbiters are expected to reach the Red Planet by November 2027.

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Space agencies launch missions all the time, but few have the subtitle of Escapade, which has not one but three main stories to pay attention to.

New Glenn’s official debut

NASA used Blue Origin’s large New Glenn rocket for the launch. New Glenn is the proverbial new kid on the block, and the Escapade mission will be the company’s first official mission into space. The role of the rocket will be to launch the Escapade into orbit and then return to Earth.

Blue original Send New Glenn into orbit for the first time in January 2025. That mission, dubbed NG-1 by Blue Origin, demonstrated that the rocket could lift off and reach space while demonstrating the company’s Blue Ring orbital transfer vehicle. But things didn’t go quite as planned. Upon re-entry into the atmosphere, New Glenn’s first stage was unable to continue the descent, missed its target and fell into the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in an explosion. FAA investigation.

For the Escapade mission, all eyes will be on whether Blue Origin fares better this time in the landing phase. 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 make its second attempt to land New Glenn first-stage rockets without incident.

If the company is successful, Blue Origin will join Elon Musk’s SpaceX as its sole commercial vendor Reusable space launch vehicles. This could help reduce the cost and increase the frequency of space launches.

13 lives of escape

One of the challenges facing Escapade’s mission is its budget. Missions to Mars are usually expensive. The Mars Exploration Rover mission began in 2003 and was launched a year later at a cost of just over $1 billion, of which $744 million was allocated to rover design and launch. And even less expensive initiatives, such as the failed 1999 initiative Mars Polar Landerstill cost north of $100 million.

Escapade didn’t have that budget. It’s part of NASA’s innovative small planetary exploration missions program. Its budget was less than $80 million, and to build the two orbiters, $55 million of that total was allocated to UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab.

“Building two interplanetary spacecraft for $55 million is not going to be easy at all,” Dr. Robert Lillis, associate director of planetary science at UC Berkeley and the Escapade mission, tells CNET. “They say space is hard, and they’re right. For us and our spacecraft partners at Rocket Lab, building robust, well-equipped interplanetary probes on a low budget has been difficult, so the challenges have been many.”

Researchers at Berkeley began working on the Blue and Gold project in 2016, and over the years, they have dealt with a myriad of hurdles, including budget concerns, the COVID-19 pandemic, supply issues from suppliers and even personal illnesses.

“I’ll put it this way, we have a slide deck called ‘The Nine Lives of Escapade,’ and I think we’re up to 13 now,” Lillis says. “I could write a book about all the things that could have killed the mission.”

Admission cost

In 2013, the Indian Space Research Organization launched its Mars orbital mission, a successful attempt to place a satellite on the red planet. The total cost of the mission was $74 million, which undercuts all other missions to Mars by a fairly large margin when adjusting for inflation.

Escapade’s budget is roughly the same, with NASA paying Blue Origin $20 million to use the New Glenn rocket on top of the $55 million given to UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab to create two orbiters. If the mission succeeds, it will be NASA’s first low-cost mission to reach Mars, and the second such mission to succeed.

Reducing the cost of admission is an important milestone for NASA. It would open up more opportunities for future Mars missions, which could help pave the way for human exploration one day, although they already exist. Many other landmarks That must be struck before that happens.

UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab have successfully developed two orbiters that will spend their lives scanning Mars’ magnetic field to gain a deeper understanding of its history, all while working within a budget that may make future missions to Mars more frequent and affordable.

The Martian magnetosphere

Despite being one of Earth’s closest neighbors, there are still a lot of question marks surrounding Mars. It is fixed to the planet It was water at some point. Over the course of its history, Mars’ magnetosphere began to be stripped away by solar winds, making it nearly impossible for water to continue to exist.

Science has a limited set of data that comes from single orbiters over decades, and Escapade hopes to fix that by having two orbiters that follow each other so that researchers can get more consistent measurements of Mars’ magnetosphere. Mars’ magnetosphere changes every minute, Lillis says, so waiting for a single orbiter to orbit it leaves many of those changes unmeasurable.

“With a single orbiter, we can measure conditions in the solar wind upstream, but then we have to wait a few hours before the spacecraft’s orbit takes us into the upper atmosphere to measure atmospheric escape rates,” Lillis said. “That’s a very long time: we know that space weather propagates through the system in just a minute or two.”

The mission’s ultimate goal is to measure and monitor how solar weather interacts with the Martian magnetosphere. According to Lillis, solar wind erodes the magnetosphere on Mars, similar to the way water erodes rocks in a river. Escapade will help science determine how quickly and how much the magnetosphere is eroding under the Sun’s constant onslaught.

Because space weather can be unpredictable, and existing data is so spread out in time, researchers aren’t quite sure what they’ll find when they get there. Berkeley has simulation models that can predict things over hours. Data from Escapade’s dual-orbit setup will help fill in many of those gaps, Lillis says.

“With Escapade, we can measure cause and effect at the same time, that is, the solar wind and the upper atmosphere simultaneously,” Lillis says. “To begin to understand this highly dynamic system, we need a cause-and-effect perspective.”

You can watch the live broadcast of the launch of the Escapade mission on Sunday at: Blue Origin website.