Technologies

NASA’s Escapade Mission May Finally Reveal How the Martian Atmosphere Works

NASA, Blue Origin and UC Berkeley combined efforts for NASA’s lowest-cost mission to Mars.

Sending anything to Mars is a much more difficult process than it seems. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union tried (and failed) in its first nine consecutive attempts, and the US was only able to succeed in quick flybys. The losing streak came to an end in 1971 with the success of the Mariner 9, the first spacecraft to orbit another planet.

More than 50 years later, Mars is still tough to get to, with only seven functional orbiters and two on-surface rovers still operating, most of which are run by NASA.

On Sunday, NASA’s Escapade, a collaborative effort among the space agency, UC Berkeley and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, will launch and attempt to add two more orbiters to the elusive club of successful missions to Mars. Liftoff is scheduled for 2:45 p.m. ET.

The mission is simple on paper: Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket will launch two Escapade orbiters into space on Nov. 9, depending on the weather and other factors.

Once there, the orbiters — nicknamed Blue and Gold after UC Berkeley’s school colors — will separate. This is where things get a little complicated. Blue and Gold will hang out at the L2 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, a part of space behind the Earth when viewed from the sun, where the orbiters can quite literally hang out without getting lost in space. They’ll stay there for a year before doing a quick flyby of Earth and departing for Mars. The twin orbiters are expected to arrive at the Red Planet by November 2027.

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Space agencies launch missions all the time but few of them have the subtext of Escapade, which has not one but three underlying storylines to pay attention to.

New Glenn’s official debut

NASA has tapped Blue Origin’s large New Glenn rocket for the launch. New Glenn is the proverbial new kid on the block, and the Escapade mission will be the company’s first official mission into space. The rocket’s role will be to launch Escapade into orbit and then return to Earth.

Blue Origin sent New Glenn into orbit for the first time in January 2025. That mission, dubbed NG-1 by Blue Origin, showed that the rocket could launch and make it to space while demonstrating the company’s Blue Ring orbital transfer vehicle. Things didn’t exactly go as planned, however. Upon reentry, New Glenn’s first stage was unable to stick its landing, missing its target and plunging into the Atlantic Ocean, prompting an FAA investigation.

For the Escapade mission, all eyes will be on whether Blue Origin will do better this time in the landing phase. Not only is this the first NASA mission for the space company, owned by the CEO of online retail giant Amazon, but it will also make its second attempt to land New Glenn’s first-stage rockets without incident.

Should the company succeed, Blue Origin will join Elon Musk’s SpaceX as the only commercial vendors with reusable space launch vehicles. This could help reduce the cost and increase the frequency of space launches.

The 13 lives of Escapade

One of the challenges of the Escapade mission is its budget. Missions to Mars are usually expensive. The Mars Exploration Rover mission started in 2003 and launched a year later cost a hair over $1 billion, with $744 million of it going to vehicle design and launch. Even less expensive initiatives, like the failed 1999 Mars Polar Lander, still cost well north of $100 million.

Escapade didn’t have that budget. It’s part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program. Its budget was less than $80 million, and to build the two orbiters, UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab were allocated $55 million of that total.

“Building two interplanetary spacecraft for $55 million was never going to be simple,” Dr. Robert Lillis, associate director for Planetary Science at UC Berkeley and the Escapade mission, tells CNET. “They say ‘space is hard’ and they’re right. For us and our spacecraft partners at Rocket Lab, it was tough to build robust, well-instrumented interplanetary probes on a low budget, so challenges were many.”

Researchers at Berkeley began work on Blue and Gold in 2016, and over the years, they dealt with myriad roadblocks, including budgetary concerns, the COVID-19 pandemic, supply issues from suppliers and even personal illnesses.

“I’ll put it this way, we have a slide deck called ‘The Nine Lives of Escapade’ and I think we’re up to 13 now,” Lillis says. “I could write a book on all the things that could’ve doomed the mission.”

The cost of admission

In 2013, the Indian Space Research Organization launched its Mars Orbital Mission, a successful attempt to put a satellite on the Red Planet. The total cost of the mission was $74 million, which undercut all other missions to Mars by a fairly significant margin when adjusting for inflation.

Escapade’s budget is roughly the same, with NASA paying Blue Origin $20 million for use of the New Glenn rocket in addition to the $55 million given to UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab for the creation of the two orbiters. Should the mission be a success, it’ll be NASA’s first low-cost mission to go as far as Mars, and the second such mission to succeed.

Reducing the cost of admission is an important milestone for NASA. It would open up more opportunities for future Mars missions, which could help pave the way for human exploration someday, although there are many other milestones that need to be hit before that can happen.

UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab successfully developed two orbiters that will spend their lifetimes scanning Mars’ magnetic field to gain a deeper understanding of its history, all while operating within a budget that may make future missions to Mars more frequent and affordable.

The Martian magnetosphere

Despite being one of Earth’s closest neighbors, there are still a lot of question marks surrounding Mars. It’s pretty well established that the planet had water at some point. Over the span of its history, the Martian magnetosphere started getting stripped away by solar winds, making it nearly impossible for water to continue to exist.

Science has a limited set of data that comes from single orbiters over the span of decades and Escapade hopes to fix that by having two orbiters that follow each other so that researchers can get more consistent measurements of the Martian magnetosphere. As Lillis says, the magnetosphere on Mars changes by the minute, so waiting for a single orbiter to circle back around leaves a lot of those changes unmeasured.

“With a single orbiter, we could measure conditions in the upstream solar wind, but then have to wait a couple of hours before the spacecraft orbit brought us into the upper atmosphere to measure the rates of atmospheric escape,” Lillis said. “That’s too long: We know the space weather propagates through the system in only one or two minutes.”

The ultimate purpose of the mission is to measure and observe how solar weather interacts with the Martian magnetosphere. Per Lillis, solar winds have been eroding the magnetosphere on Mars, similar to how water erodes rock in a river. Escapade will help science determine how fast and how much of the magnetosphere has eroded under the sun’s constant onslaught.

Because space weather can be so unpredictable and the existing data is spread out too far in terms of time, researchers aren’t quite sure what they’re going to find when they get there. Berkeley has simulation models that can predict things over the span of hours. Lillis says that the data from Escapade’s two-orbiter setup will help fill in a lot of those gaps.

“With Escapade, we can measure cause and effect at the same time, i.e., the solar wind and upper atmosphere simultaneously,” says Lillis. “To start to understand this highly dynamic system, we need that cause and effect perspective.”

You can watch the livestream of the Escapade mission launch on Sunday, at Blue Origin’s website.

Technologies

Anthropic warns investors of AI’s ‘existential risk to humanity’ in IPO prospectus, reports say

Anthropic’s IPO filing dedicates 80 pages to the risks of AI, nearly double the 48 pages it spends discussing its business plans, according to Reuters.

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Technologies

U.S., Iran hold separate mediator talks as Mideast oil exports hit war-time high

Iranian and U.S. officials reportedly met separately with mediators Monday to push for a ceasefire, as Middle Eastern crude exports rebounded to war-time high.

Iranian and U.S. officials reportedly met separately with mediators Monday to push for a ceasefire.

Middle Eastern crude exports rebounded this month to around their highest level since the war began in February.

An outright export ban by Washington on diesel would keep roughly 1.2 million barrels a day at home, and risks overwhelming Gulf Coast storage, according to Kpler.

The building of the destroyed Shajareh Tayebeh primary school is pictured surrounded by rubble in Minab in Iran’s Hormozgan province on August 10, 2026. Six months on, a team of AFP journalists obtained rare access to the school which has remained largely in ruins, its collapsed walls and twisted steel now surrounded by portraits of the children killed as Iranian flags flutter above the rubble. Iran says the attack on the school involved two separate US Tomahawk missiles but neither the United States nor Israel has officially claimed responsibility for the strike. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP via Getty Images) /

Atta Kenare | Afp | Getty Images

U.S. and Iranian officials have reportedly held separate indirect talks with mediators on Monday, reviving efforts to end seven months of war as Tehran presses for a response to a revised ceasefire framework and Middle East crude exports climb to their highest level since the conflict began.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met Qatari mediators in New York, where he remained after the United Nations General Assembly, and reportedly said he expects Washington’s reply by Tuesday. “We talked about ideas and how to find solutions to fulfil Iran’s conditions,” Araghchi said, adding that he planned to return to Tehran once a response arrives. “Whenever the Qataris have a response, they know how to get it to us.”

Iran’s proposal, first presented on the sidelines of last week’s General Assembly, calls for a four- to five-day U.S. timeline to release frozen Iranian funds, lift sanctions on Iranian oil and end the naval blockade of Iranian ports, with nuclear talks beginning within seven days. Tehran has tied any reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to those steps.

President Donald Trump had on Sunday called the plan “unacceptable” and rejected it, telling reporters Iran wants a swift deal because of the economic pressure it is under. Speaking at the White House Monday, Trump said U.S. officials had spoken separately with mediators but gave no further details, adding: “We’re going to win. It’s going to go pretty quickly.”

The diplomatic push comes as physical supply data shows the war’s toll on the oil market easing. Middle Eastern crude exports rebounded this month to around their highest level since the war began in February, Kpler data showed. “Middle East crude exports at just under 80% of pre-conflict levels,” the tracking firm said in a note on Monday.

The Strait of Hormuz itself remains far from normal. Kpler’s real-time tracking showed total clearance through the strait at 10,591 kilobarrels a day on Saturday, against a pre-war baseline of 17,133.

Technologies

Oil prices fall as crude exports recover at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea ports

Saudi Arabia has restored flows through the pipeline to around 3.5 million barrels per day, according to media reports.

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