NASA's twin ESCAPADE spacecraft completed back-to-back flybys of Earth on Nov. 7 and Nov. 9, each one combining the planet's gravity with a sustained engine burn to bend its trajectory toward Mars. NASA says it has not previously flown this specific maneuver, known as a powered flyby, on an interplanetary mission.
The first spacecraft made its closest approach to Earth at roughly 2:51 a.m. Mountain time on Nov. 7, followed by a trans-Mars injection burn lasting about nine minutes. The second spacecraft repeated the sequence roughly two days later. Mission officials described both maneuvers as executed flawlessly, a result that matters because the spacecraft had only a narrow window to pick up the precise velocity change needed to reach Mars on schedule.
Nicknamed Blue and Gold, the two orbiters launched together in November 2025 as part of ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers — a mission built under NASA's lower-cost SIMPLEx program and led by physicist Rob Lillis at the University of California, Berkeley. The SIMPLEx line funds planetary missions on a fraction of a flagship budget, and ESCAPADE is widely watched as a test of whether that cheaper model can still deliver serious science. After launch, the spacecraft spent roughly a year looping through a holding orbit near the Earth-Sun L2 point, a detour that set up this week's Earth flybys and the gravity assist they needed to put the pair on a direct path to Mars.
Once they arrive in September 2027, Blue and Gold are designed to become the first mission to station two coordinated science orbiters around Mars at once, flying through different parts of the planet's magnetic environment simultaneously. The goal, according to NASA's heliophysics division, is to measure how the solar wind strips away particles from Mars's thin upper atmosphere through gaps in its patchy, weak magnetic field — a slow erosion process scientists think helped turn an early, wetter Mars into the dry world seen today.
NASA has published a detailed account of the flyby sequence on the mission's blog. The spacecraft now face roughly ten months of cruise before Mars arrival, followed by a multi-month commissioning phase in orbit before science observations begin in earnest.
