Two NASA-funded Mars probes carried out a maneuver never before attempted by a spacecraft headed to the red planet, each borrowing a boost from Earth's own gravity on its way out of the solar system's inner neighborhood. The twin orbiters, nicknamed Blue and Gold, completed back-to-back close passes of Earth on Nov. 7 and Nov. 9, each combining the slingshot effect of a flyby with a firing of its own engine to pick up extra speed toward Mars.
At closest approach, the spacecraft came within 600 to 1,100 miles of Earth's surface, passing over southern Australia. During each pass, an engine burn lasting roughly nine minutes added more than 1,000 mph to the probe's velocity, pushing it from about 6.3 to 6.7 miles per second, or roughly Mach 30. NASA describes the combined technique, known as an Oberth maneuver, as the first time it has been used by a spacecraft on its way to Mars.
A first-of-its-kind boost
The maneuver is central to the mission's design. NASA's ESCAPADE probes, built for the agency by Rocket Lab and led by principal investigator Rob Lillis of the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, launched on Nov. 13, 2025, on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket. Because Earth and Mars were on opposite sides of the sun at liftoff, the spacecraft first looped out to a parking orbit beyond the moon before swinging back for last week's Earth flybys, a cheaper route than a direct burn toward Mars would have allowed, as Space.com detailed in its own account of the flybys.
Once they arrive at Mars in September 2027, Blue and Gold are designed to orbit the planet at different points simultaneously, giving scientists a rare stereo view of how the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun, interacts with Mars's weak magnetic field and thin atmosphere. Researchers believe that interaction, over billions of years, stripped away much of the atmosphere Mars once had, transforming a once-wetter world into the dry planet seen today. The mission will be the first to fly two coordinated science spacecraft around Mars at once.
NASA said mission scientists also gathered unplanned data as the probes passed through a distant, little-studied region of Earth's own magnetotail during the flybys, and that researchers are now reviewing those readings for findings to publish separately. With the trans-Mars injection complete, the two spacecraft are expected to need only minor course corrections over the next ten months before reaching Mars orbit in September 2027, when ESCAPADE's primary science campaign will begin.