ESCAPEDE Mission:
Blue Origin has successfully launched Nasa’s highly anticipated Escapade mission to Mars.
- The ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission is the first coordinated multi-spacecraft orbital science mission to the Mars.
- Its twin orbiters known as Blue and Gold which will take simultaneous observations from different locations around Mars.
- It is part of NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) program.
- This mission has chosen ‘launch and loiter’ strategy
- It means the satellites will launch from Earth toward the Lagrange 2 Point (L2), a point in space where the balance of Earth and Sun’s gravitational pull ensures that a spacecraft stays put.
- The spacecraft will stay put or loiter at L2 until the apt window for Mars travel opens up, and then it will move toward Mars in late 2026.
- It will reveal the planet’s real-time response to space weather and how the Martian magnetosphere changes over time,
- These spacecraft will travel to Mars to study the interaction between solar wind, streams of charged particles from the Sun, and the Martian magnetic field.
- Understanding how solar wind strips Mars of its atmosphere is critical for planetary science and future human exploration.
