Both spacecraft will launch together in fall 2025. They will each take slightly different paths to Mars, and one will arrive in orbit around the red planet a few days after the other.
No space mission has ever sent two orbiters to Mars at the same time. By having two probes in different places around Mars, scientists will be able to disentangle how much conditions around the planet are shifting from moment to moment or from place to place. ESCAPADE will also be able to use one probe to measure the solar wind as it comes in toward Mars, while the other watches how the planet’s atmosphere responds at almost the exact same instant.
“With ESCAPADE, we’re going to be able to do that for the first time,” said Robert Lillis, principal investigator for ESCAPADE and associate director for planetary science at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. This should give scientists a clearer sense of cause and effect in Mars’ atmospheric escape.
ESCAPADE is part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, which aims to explore space more cheaply in exchange for accepting higher risk. That typically means less testing of the spacecraft and its systems, less built-in redundancy in case something goes wrong, and faster development timelines. The upshot is that ESCAPADE cost less than $80 million. For comparison, MAVEN, another Mars orbiter that studied atmospheric escape and helped lay the groundwork for ESCAPADE, cost more than five times that amount to build and launch.
“More science per dollar, bang for your buck, call it what you will,” said Lillis, “We’re one of the guinea pigs.”