Source | Rocket Lab Corp.
Rocket Lab Corp. (Long Beach, Calif., U.S.) announced the success launch of its two Explorer-class spacecraft for NASA (Washington, D.C., U.S.) and the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (Oakland, U.S.), beginning their journey to Mars to study the red planet’s magnetosphere. NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission was launched by Blue Origin on Nov. 13, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 3:55 p.m. EST.
Rocket Lab has successfully established contact with the spacecraft, which are generating power. Now in orbit, the spacecraft will undergo commissioning by Rocket Lab’s spacecraft operations team in the coming days, beginning with early checkouts including orientation stabilization and solar array deployment, followed by commissioning of flight computers, multiple antenna, guidance and navigation sensors and actuators, and the propulsion system leading up to the mission’s first maneuvers.
Rocket Lab’s Explorer-class spacecraft platform is a high delta-V, interplanetary member of its advanced satellite family, which includes Photon, Pioneer and Lightning. According to a 2024 blog post on the subject, Rocket Lab says, “The spacecraft share many common components and subsystems, designed and manufactured in-house by Rocket Lab, including carbon [fiber] composite structures, star trackers, reaction wheels, solar arrays, radios, separation systems, avionics, flight and ground software.”
From contract award to launch, ESCAPADE moved from design to spacecraft completion in just 3.5 years — an aggressive timeline for a Mars mission. This was made possible by the company’s vertically integrated supply chain, which brings production entirely in-house.
“Mars missions have historically been measured in decades and come with price tags in the billions or hundreds of millions. With this mission we’re bringing Mars closer, proving real interplanetary science can be done faster and more cost-effectively to unlock the solar system,” says Sir Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. “ESCAPADE is a major first, not just for Rocket Lab, but for commercial interplanetary science.”
Now in orbit, a complex and extended journey begins for Blue and Gold, with trajectory design led by Advanced Space LLC (Westminster, Colo., U.S.). The alignment between Earth and Mars does not currently allow ESCAPADE to use a traditional direct-to-Mars transfer. Instead, ESCAPADE will launch into a “loiter” (or “Earth-proximity”) orbit that loops around Earth’s Lagrange point 2 (about a million miles from Earth, opposite the Sun) until the next planetary alignment window. once the planets have reached the ideal alignment in fall 2026, the ESCAPADE spacecraft will use an Earth gravity assist to begin the journey to Mars.
Throughout the mission, Rocket Lab and UC Berkeley spacecraft operators will command the spacecraft to conduct deep-space maneuvers, known as trajectory correction maneuvers (TCMs). The TCMs will boost the spacecraft’s energy to reach Mars and provide navigation control to target their unique orbit insertion corridors. The spacecraft are scheduled to arrive at Mars in September 2027. The spacecraft will begin to transition to their first science formation in 2028.
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