OUR SPACE: When space weather messes up Space Weather Science
Published 2:24 pm Tuesday, November 18, 2025
If you’ve been reading Our Space for a while you will be well aware of how important space weather is to our lives. Granted, it doesn’t make you wonder whether or not to bring an umbrella, but it can mess up your TV experience, scramble your online bank transactions and even lead to rolling blackouts as power transmission lines become overwhelmed. The culprit here is always the sun — our star’s emissions of highly charged particles with the solar wind can play havoc with all things electronic. Studying space weather, improving forecasting and learning how to shield vital satellites and space probes is absolutely necessary for our everyday safety and life as we know it.
So it’s quite the irony if space weather prevents a launch of a pair of spacecraft that are designed to study space weather, but that’s exactly what happened with the ESCAPADE Mars mission last week! Fortunately a launch window was available the very next day and the launch went off without a hitch, with the first stage of the rocket landing safely back on Earth to be reused for another haul to orbit.
ESCAPADE stands for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers — twin spacecraft that will explore the effects of space weather on the Martian atmosphere. Mars lost its magnetic field a long time ago, leaving the planet vulnerable to the vicious solar wind that quite literally blew most of its atmosphere away. We can learn a lot from how this works on Mars, as our own fair planet will likely face an identical scenario when its own magnetic field wanes.
The two ESCAPADE spacecraft launched atop Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Due to a multitude of reasons the mission didn’t get off the ground some time back when a direct trajectory to Mars was available. However, the crafty engineers at NASA have devised an ingenious plan: launch the rocket now and send it into a Lagrange parking orbit — one of those cool places where a spacecraft can hang out indefinitely because Earth’s and the Sun’s gravitational pull is perfectly balanced there. Then, when the path comes into view in late 2026, the spacecraft will start moving again and journey towards Mars on the low-fuel trajectory they’ve been waiting for.
Of course the spacecraft won’t be idle while they wait for the right moment — you can study space weather just about anywhere in the solar system, and the data the twin craft will gather there will serve as a great comparison point to what they will find near Mars.
Sadly, this was not ESCAPADE’s first weather-related delay; it seems to always get scheduled for days that end up with nasty storms, so it’s oddly appropriate that a coronal mass ejection from the sun threw a wrench in its works at least once.
But there was no particular rush, either, since the probes are heading for a quiet parking spot for a while anyway. Still, launch delays are costly; it takes an enormous amount of preparation to launch a rocket, and there’s a long list of things that all must go right — sometimes it’s a miracle that any launch ever gets off the ground. But when they do — it’s always a sight to behold, especially at night. Originally the two ESCAPADE spacecraft were supposed to hitch a ride with the Psyche spacecraft, but when that mission was switched to a Falcon 9 Heavy rocket it was no longer feasible to drop the two space weather explorers off near Mars.
ESCAPADE is NASA’s first Mars mission since the Perseverance rover launched in 2020. It’s also the first time that a team of spacecraft was launched to Mars. While the ESCAPADE spacecraft will not land on the Red Planet they will keep other Mars orbiters company.
Here’s another interesting tidbit about the ESCAPADE twin spacecraft: rather than calling them ESCAPADE 1 and ESCAPADE 2 the spacecraft are called Blue and Gold. This is a direct nod to the school colors of the University of California at Berkeley who was a major contributor to the mission, along with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and others. As far as interplanetary missions go, ESCAPADE is doing things on the cheap: the spacecraft cost around 55 million dollars while the launch vehicle and launch come in at around 20 million. Space exploration always has big price tags, but compared to a flagship mission, like the Webb telescope, ESCAPADE is practically peanuts. And let’s not forget that none of that money is truly gone — it pays for the scientists and engineers who work on the mission and the tech companies providing components and mission support services. The money is spent right here at home.
Learn more about this fascinating mission with a knack for irony at https://science.nasa.gov/mission/escapade/ .
—Beate Czogalla is the Professor of Theater Design in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Georgia College & State University. She has had a lifelong interest in space exploration and has been a Solar System Ambassador for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/ NASA for many years. She can be reached at our_space2@yahoo.com .