NASA’s twin ESCAPADE spacecraft are on their way to Mars after pulling off a maneuver no Mars-bound mission had flown before. Blue completed its powered Earth flyby on Saturday, November 7, and Gold followed on Monday, November 9, each firing its engine for about nine minutes while Earth’s gravity bent its path toward the Red Planet.
The burns lifted each spacecraft’s speed from about 6.3 miles per second to about 6.7, a gain of more than 1,000 miles per hour, according to NASA. Blue passed about 1,000 miles above Earth. Gold came closer, about 650 miles up.
The technique is a powered flyby, also called an Oberth maneuver. Firing the engine at closest approach squeezes extra energy from the same amount of propellant, NASA said.
“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,” said Asal Naseri, acting associate flight director for ESCAPADE at NASA’s Heliophysics Division.
The pair now face a 10-month cruise. Blue is due at Mars on September 7, 2027, and Gold on September 9. Once there, they will fly in formation around the planet, the first mission to do so, studying how the solar wind strips away the Martian atmosphere.
ESCAPADE launched on November 13, 2025, aboard Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral. Earth and Mars sat on opposite sides of the Sun at launch, so mission planners sent the pair on a long loop out to the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 before swinging them back home for the slingshot. The mission is led by UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory under NASA’s SIMPLEx program.
Source: NASA
