NASA's twin ESCAPADE spacecraft will each fire its engine for about nine minutes while swinging close past Earth in the coming days, performing what the agency calls "a maneuver that no agency spacecraft has flown before." The probe named Blue is scheduled to go first on Saturday, Nov. 7, with its sibling Gold following two days later, according to Eos, the American Geophysical Union's news magazine.
Each spacecraft, about the size of a standard refrigerator, will pass 600 to 1,100 miles above Earth's surface. The trans-Mars injection burn, the push that sends a probe toward Mars, is expected to raise each craft's speed by more than 1,000 mph, from about 6.3 to about 6.7 miles per second.
The twins launched on Nov. 13, 2025, aboard Blue Origin's second New Glenn rocket and have since flown a kidney-shaped loop around L2, a point where the gravitational pulls of Earth and the Sun balance, waiting for the planets to align. That detour carried them through a distant region of Earth's magnetotail, the part of our magnetic environment stretched outward by the solar wind. "They got a unique set of observations that will be discovery-level science," ESCAPADE principal investigator Robert Lillis, associate director of UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, told Eos.