Two refrigerator-sized spacecraft will fly back past Earth this weekend and early next week, each passing between 600 and 1,100 miles above the surface. NASA’s ESCAPADE twins, built to study how the solar wind strips the Martian atmosphere, will use the encounters to gain speed for the trip to Mars. The first pass comes on Saturday, Nov. 7, and the second on Monday, Nov. 9.
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Each spacecraft fires its engine during the flyby, a combination NASA describes as a powered flyby that no agency spacecraft has flown before.
The two flybys and their burn times
According to NASA’s ESCAPADE blog post of Nov. 2, Spacecraft 1 reaches closest approach around 5 a.m. EST on Saturday, Nov. 7, with its engine burn beginning at 4:51 a.m. EST. Spacecraft 2 follows with closest approach around 6 a.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 9, and a burn starting at 5:51 a.m. EST. Each burn lasts about nine minutes and is fired as the spacecraft flies over southern Australia. Closest approach for the first craft falls at about 2:51 a.m. Mountain Time, which matters for observers in the western United States. At that point each probe is 600 to 1,100 miles up, higher than most Earth-orbiting satellites.
The two encounters are about two days apart, with the second craft arriving an hour later in the morning than the first.
The powered flyby and its 1,000 mph gain
The trans-Mars injection burn raises each spacecraft’s speed by more than 1,000 mph, from about 6.3 to about 6.7 miles per second, or Mach 30 to Mach 31 by NASA’s comparison. Firing at closest approach, where gravity has already pulled the craft to its highest speed, makes the engine more effective than the same burn in empty space. NASA also calls the technique an Oberth maneuver. The result is a trajectory that carries each probe out of Earth’s neighborhood without the large amount of fuel a direct departure would have required.
Both craft are about the size of a standard refrigerator. Spotting either one will take planning and probably optics.
Looking for them from the ground
Observers may need a telescope, since the spacecraft will appear as dim points moving against the stars. In the western United States, NASA says Spacecraft 1 should be brightest between midnight and 1 a.m. PST on Nov. 7, and Spacecraft 2 between 1 and 2 a.m. PST on Nov. 9. Each takes several hours to cross the sky from east to west. NASA points to the JPL Horizons System for coordinates, and offers star chart maps for other locations from its Scientific Visualization Studio. Dim moving points are hard to pick out without exact positions, so the Horizons coordinates are the practical starting point for anyone with a telescope.
Instruments, the loiter orbit and the 2027 arrival
NASA’s mission page lists the instruments carried by the pair: an electrostatic analyzer from the University of California, Berkeley, a magnetometer from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a Langmuir probe from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, with visible and infrared cameras contributed by Northern Arizona University as a student instrument. Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory manages the mission, with Rocket Lab and Blue Origin among the partners. The design puts one spacecraft upstream in the solar wind and the other downstream inside the Martian magnetosphere, so that changes in the incoming solar wind can be matched against the response a short time later. Mars has a hybrid magnetosphere assembled from crustal and induced magnetic fields, and nothing else in the solar system works quite the same way, which is the reason two vantage points are worth the cost of two spacecraft.
The mission launched in November 2025, when Earth and Mars sat on opposite sides of the Sun. Instead of heading straight out, the pair looped around the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 in a loiter orbit and returned to Earth in November 2026. Mars-bound missions usually launch when the planets align, which happens every 26 months, and the loiter let ESCAPADE leave on its own schedule. NASA’s mission page says it flew on Blue Origin’s New Glenn 2 on Nov. 13, 2025, from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
After the flybys, each spacecraft makes a cruise of about 10 months, with trajectory correction maneuvers to fine-tune the path. NASA lists arrival at Mars as Sept. 7, 2027 for the first and Sept. 9, 2027 for the second. They will be the first multi-spacecraft mission to fly in formation around Mars, studying how the solar wind interacts with the planet’s environment and drives atmospheric loss. During the loiter phase the pair also crossed a distant region of Earth’s magnetotail that no spacecraft had directly explored; NASA says scientists reported interesting activity and structure and plan to share findings soon, with results promised on the ESCAPADE blog.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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