NASA schedules its twin ESCAPADE probes' Earth flybys for November 7 and 9, on the way to Mars

NASA's schedule brings two refrigerator-sized spacecraft that left Florida in November 2025 back past Earth this month on their way to Mars. In a November 2 post, the agency set the first ESCAPADE probe's closest approach and engine burn for around 5 a.m. EST on Saturday, November 7, 2026, and its twin's for around 6 a.m. EST on Monday, November 9. NASA said then that no Mars-bound spacecraft had successfully carried out a flyby of this kind, in which a planet's gravity and an engine burn work together.

The route exists because of timing. Earth and Mars line up for the shortest trip only every 26 months, and earlier Mars missions launched in those windows. ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, lifted off on November 13, 2025, on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, with the planets on opposite sides of the Sun. The pair then flew a kidney-bean-shaped loop around the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2, roughly a million miles from Earth, until the alignment came back.

The two burns

NASA's plan puts the spacecraft 600 to 1,100 miles up at closest approach, higher than most satellites, with each firing for about nine minutes over southern Australia. The timing takes advantage of what NASA described in 2025 as the Oberth effect: a rocket engine does more good when the vehicle is already moving fast. NASA's figures have each burn adding more than 1,000 mph, lifting the speed from about 6.3 to about 6.7 miles per second.

This report rests on that schedule and does not give the outcome of either burn. NASA said the team would need several days after the burns to learn how well the spacecraft are aimed, with course corrections to follow during the cruise. An earlier correction gave trouble: in December 2025, one spacecraft showed low thrust during a burn. The team delayed the attempt and completed it on January 6, 2026. NASA said in December that there were, for now, no long-term impacts from the delay. Its posts do not give a cause.

What the pair will do at Mars

NASA bills ESCAPADE as the first mission to fly more than one spacecraft in formation around Mars. It is meant to measure how the solar wind, a stream of material from the Sun moving at about a million miles per hour, interacts with the planet's magnetic environment and drives the loss of its atmosphere.

Getting to work takes time. Each spacecraft fires for about 11 minutes to enter a capture orbit lasting about 60 hours, and both then shrink their orbits before a communications break at solar conjunction in late 2027. NASA's mission page has them in nearly matching science orbits by mid-2028, while a November 2025 post said science would start in spring 2028. Two campaigns are planned: six months with one spacecraft trailing the other, then five months in different orbits.

The long way around has already produced a side result. On their loop the spacecraft crossed a distant stretch of Earth's magnetotail that NASA says no spacecraft had directly explored, and mission scientists plan to share their findings soon. The University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory leads the mission, and Rocket Lab designed the spacecraft, under NASA's program of small planetary missions, SIMPLEx.

Watching from the ground

NASA said the spacecraft would look faint and that seeing them would probably take a telescope. It expected them to be brightest for the western United States between midnight and 1 a.m. PST on November 7 and between 1 and 2 a.m. PST on November 9, and to be visible with telescopes from southern Australia during the burns. The agency pointed observers to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Horizons System for coordinates.