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Two small spacecraft have just used Earth itself as a slingshot. NASA's twin ESCAPADE probes, Blue and Gold, swung past our planet on 7 and 9 November 2026, fired their engines at the closest point of each pass, and are now on their way to Mars. It is the first time a Mars-bound mission has used a powered Earth flyby — and it is also a clever answer to a problem that has haunted Mars missions for decades: you can only launch when the planets line up.
What is ESCAPADE?
ESCAPADE stands for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers. The two identical probes, named after the colours of the University of California, Berkeley, are the first planetary mission led by UC Berkeley, built by Rocket Lab and flown under NASA's Heliophysics programme at a cost of about $80 million. Their job is to study Mars' strange "hybrid" magnetosphere and how the solar wind strips away the planet's atmosphere — the process that helped turn a once-wetter Mars into the dry world we see today.
The probes launched on 13 November 2025 aboard Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, on only its second flight. But Earth and Mars were on opposite sides of the Sun, so a direct trip was impossible. Instead, the probes spent about a year loitering in a kidney-bean-shaped loop around the Earth–Sun Lagrange point L2, roughly 930,000 miles away, waiting for the alignment to turn favourable. That trick decouples the launch from the rigid 26-month window that normally governs Mars missions.
How does a powered flyby work?
A gravity assist steals a little of a planet's momentum: a spacecraft falls toward the planet, whips around it, and leaves faster than it arrived. ESCAPADE went one step further. Each probe fired its engine for about nine minutes at closest approach — the point where it was moving fastest — in what engineers call an Oberth manoeuvre. Blue passed about 1,000 miles above Earth at around 05:00 EST on Saturday 7 November; Gold followed at about 06:00 EST on Monday 9 November, roughly 48 hours later, so that NASA's Deep Space Network could track each one in turn. Each probe's speed rose by more than 1,000 mph, from about 6.3 to about 6.7 miles per second, putting them on a trajectory to Mars.
Gravity assists themselves are routine — almost every deep-space mission uses them. What is new here is the powered Earth flyby on a Mars-bound mission, and doing it twice, with two spacecraft, two days apart.
What happens next?
The probes now face a roughly ten-month cruise. Mars orbit insertion burns of about eleven minutes each are planned for 7 and 9 September 2027, and the science phase runs from June 2028 to May 2029. Flying in formation, the pair will make two-point measurements of the Martian magnetosphere at altitudes from 160 to 10,000 kilometres, in a science orbit of about 160 by 8,400 kilometres, carrying a magnetometer, an electrostatic analyser and a Langmuir probe.
If it works, ESCAPADE will show how the solar wind eats a planet's sky in real time — and prove that small, cheap missions can do serious planetary science. Two little spacecraft, one big slingshot, and a year of patience: that is how you get to Mars when the planets refuse to cooperate. Read more about the growing traffic above our heads in how bad Earth's space junk problem is and about building in orbit in how a robot built a structure in space, plus why governments are telling people to stockpile food. Sources: NASA, Space.com.