NASA’s newest Mars mission just pulled off a move the agency had never tried before, and it did it twice in two days. The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft have each completed a powered flyby of Earth, using our planet’s gravity together with an engine burn to slingshot themselves toward the Red Planet.

Here is what happened and why it matters, based on NASA’s mission update on NASA Science.

What ESCAPADE is

ESCAPADE stands for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers. It is a pair of small spacecraft designed to study how the solar wind, a stream of material flowing from the Sun at about a million miles per hour, interacts with Mars and drives the loss of its atmosphere.

The mission is led by the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, with partners including Rocket Lab, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Advanced Space and Blue Origin. It is part of NASA’s SIMPLEx program, which supports innovative planetary missions on smaller budgets.

Two flybys, two days

The first spacecraft made its closest approach around 5 a.m. EST on Saturday, November 7, about 1,000 miles above Earth. During the flyby it fired its engine for roughly nine minutes, a trans-Mars injection burn that commits it to the path toward Mars.

The second spacecraft followed two days later, at about 6 a.m. EST on Monday, November 9, passing about 650 miles above the surface and performing its own burn.

“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 NASA’s Heliophysics Division.

A new way to get to Mars

Most Mars missions launch during a narrow window that opens roughly every two years, when the planets line up. ESCAPADE did something different.

The spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral on November 13, 2025, when Earth and Mars were on opposite sides of the Sun. Instead of heading straight out, they entered a “loiter” orbit, a kidney-bean-shaped path around a gravitational balance point about a million miles from Earth called Lagrange point 2. A year later, with the planets better aligned, they swung back past Earth for the gravity assist.

“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.

Science already under way

The spacecraft were not idle while they waited. During the loiter orbit, they flew several times through Earth’s magnetotail, the part of our planet’s magnetic environment that the solar wind stretches out away from the Sun. On the 10-month cruise to Mars, they will also be able to study the solar wind between the two planets.

The road ahead

Here is the timeline NASA has laid out:

  1. Cruise: About 10 months, with a series of trajectory correction maneuvers along the way.
  2. Arrival: Mars orbit insertion burns planned for September 7 and September 9, 2027, each lasting about 11 minutes.
  3. First science formation: After several months of maneuvering, the two spacecraft will follow one another in the same orbit. Science operations are expected to begin in June 2028.
  4. Second campaign: Six months later, one spacecraft will move farther out to watch the incoming solar wind while the other stays closer to the planet to see how Mars responds in real time. That campaign is scheduled to last five months.

“This will be the first science mission to choreograph two orbiters around Mars,” said principal investigator Rob Lillis of UC Berkeley.

Why it matters for future explorers

Understanding how the solar wind strips away Mars’ atmosphere helps explain how the planet changed over billions of years. It also has practical value. “By better understanding how the solar wind affects the Martian environment, ESCAPADE’s findings could help us plan and prepare for future human exploration of the Red Planet,” said Michele Cash, ESCAPADE program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

The bottom line

ESCAPADE’s double slingshot shows that getting to Mars does not have to wait for a once-every-two-years launch window. If the approach keeps working, it could give future missions far more flexibility. For now, two small spacecraft are cruising toward a September 2027 arrival and a first-of-its-kind, two-orbiter study of the Red Planet.

Image: ESCAPADE Mission Posters (SVS14641 – ESCAPADE FINAL Horizontal-Front) by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio – TRAX International/ via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Mark 1.0