ESCAPADE twins target November 7 and 9 Earth flybys toward Mars

NASA’s twin Mars probes are preparing for powered Earth flybys on November 7 and 9. Each planned encounter pairs a gravity assist with an engine burn; Mars arrival remains a 2027 target.

NASA’s ESCAPADE twins are approaching a decisive departure step: separate powered flybys of Earth planned for November 7 and 9. The manoeuvres would put the two probes on course for Mars after almost a year spent waiting near Earth’s orbit.

A November 2 mission update places the encounters around 5 a.m. EST on November 7 and 6 a.m. EST on November 9 — approximately 10:00 and 11:00 UTC, respectively. Each spacecraft is due to fire its engine for about nine minutes near closest approach. These are scheduled manoeuvres, not completed departures.

Why return to Earth?

The mission launched on November 13, 2025, outside the usual geometry for a direct Mars transfer. Instead, the spacecraft followed a broad loitering loop around the Sun–Earth L2 region. Returning now lets them use Earth’s gravity as part of their onward route, as the mission’s flight plan explains.

A gravity assist changes a spacecraft’s direction around a moving planet. In an ideal unpowered encounter, its far-away incoming and outgoing speeds relative to that planet are equal; relative to the Sun, the encounter can change its orbital energy. ESA’s explanation makes that distinction explicit. ESCAPADE adds an engine burn, supplying another change in velocity. The turn and the powered push work together; gravity alone does not provide the whole departure manoeuvre.

Two viewpoints on escaping Martian air

ESCAPADE, led by the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, is designed to investigate how energy from the solar wind helps particles escape Mars. Measuring that process can clarify how the planet’s atmosphere changes; it does not by itself reconstruct every cause of Mars’ past climate.

The paired probes offer two ways to disentangle changes in place from changes in time. First they will follow nearly the same orbit, sampling a region at different times. Later, different orbits will let them compare the incoming solar wind with conditions elsewhere in Mars’ magnetic environment simultaneously.

The flybys open the next stage

The current arrival targets are September 7 and 9, 2027, conditional on successful departures and the cruise ahead. Course corrections and separate Mars orbit-insertion burns still lie between the twins and their destination. NASA’s phased mission plan also separates arrival from the main science campaign: orbit adjustments continue after capture, with final science-orbit manoeuvres planned by mid-2028.

For this week, the immediate test is navigation and propulsion. The November schedule sets out what the team intends to do; successful Mars departure will need confirmation after the encounters.