NASA’s Risky ESCAPADE Mission Has a New Launch Plan, Heralding Low-Cost Planetary Science

NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE mission finally has a launch date — again.

Part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, which aims to fund low-cost, high-risk missions, the $80 million-budget ESCAPADE was supposed to catch a ride share with NASA’s much bigger budget Psyche mission. But the Psyche mission’s selection of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket changed Psyche’s trajectory in such a way that it no longer worked for the ESCAPADE mission, leaving the latter in search of a new launch.

Now, ESCAPADE is scheduled for launch sometime in August 2024 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, according to a recent announcement, serving as the first commercial payload of the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket. 

“We didn’t expect to be a primary [payload],” Jeff Parker, chief technology officer at Advanced Space, which created the mission design for ESCAPADE, told SpaceRef. “We didn’t expect to be on a large rocket like Blue Origin’s New Glenn, but it certainly is exciting to do that.”

While working at NASA’s JPL prior to joining Advanced Space, Parker supported NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL mission to map the interior of the Moon using two spacecraft named “Ebb” and “Flow,” and brought that experience to bear on the ESCAPADE project. Rocket Lab built the two ESCAPADE spacecraft, which are dubbed “Blue” and “Gold,” a nod to the school colors of the University of California, Berkeley, which hosts the ESCAPADE science team.

Science-wise, ESCAPADE is in some ways a follow-up to NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission, which has been in orbit around Mars and studying the Red Planet’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, and their interactions with the solar wind since 2014.

“MAVEN is focused squarely, with a nine instrument suite, on understanding the processes that drive atmospheric escape,” that is, how Mars lost its once-thicker atmosphere, Berkeley physicist and ESCAPADE science team leader Robert Lillis told SpaceRef. “ESCAPADE is two spacecraft with a subset of the instrumentation MAVEN has.”

By flying two spacecraft, ESCAPADE can do what MAVEN cannot — fly in two places around Mars at once, and gather data with greater geographic resolution.

“If you only have one spacecraft that’s instrumented in the way that Maven is, when you see something change,” be that a change in magnetic fields, or the flow of charged particles in the Martian upper atmosphere, Lillis explained, “you don’t know whether you’re seeing a global change everywhere or whether the spacecraft is just entering a new region where the conditions are different.”

“High value,” high risk

Launching a twin spacecraft mission from Earth and getting both spacecraft into formation orbiting around Mars isn’t easy, especially with such a small budget.

“I like to use the phrase ‘high value,’” Parker said. “Launch vehicles typically cost more money than our entire budget.”

After being removed from Psyche, the ESCAPADE mission profile changed repeatedly in order to afford the team the most flexibility in catching another rideshare to Mars, with new modifications repeatedly getting scrapped as the team went through various options.

“We would introduce a Mars gravity assist, and then we took the Mars gravity assist away. We introduced aerobraking, and then we took aerobraking away,” Parker said. “A lot of different design features came and went based on how, you know, how the mission was taking shape.”

Now that ESCAPADE finds itself the primary payload on the first commercial New Glenn launch, the plan is for the twin spacecraft to enter a one or two-day Earth orbit before traveling to Mars under their own power, according to Lillis.

However, other technical challenges persisted across each different launch scheme. One design issue is the matter of how to handle high data communications back to Earth from two very small spacecraft. At just under 400 pounds each, the scale of the ESCAPADE spacecraft meant engineers had to keep their antennas on the smaller side, at just less than 2 feet in diameter. 

“We have two small spacecraft, and we are data limited in the sense that we can’t transmit just all the data we want,” Parker told SpaceRef. We have to pick and choose what data we do transmit, even so much as waiting for the planets to be lined up in the solar system so that Earth and Mars are closer together than they sometimes are.”

There are some benefits of flying two spacecraft in close formation, however, particularly during their cruise phase en route to Mars.

“Since we’re flying two spacecraft to Mars, we can fly them close enough together that our Deep Space Network antennas can talk to both spacecraft at the same time, which saves us some of our budget,” Parker said. he added, a bit tongue in cheek, since actual costs vary from mission to mission, that “The deep space network is like $1,000 an hour.”

But the challenges faced by ESCAPADE are part of the reward, according to Lillis.

“I think there is a real opportunity here, and this is what former NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen had in mind when he approved this line of low-cost planetary missions,” Lillis said, referring to the SIMPLEx program. “He wanted to see the balance between risk and cost.”

The ESCAPADE part of that experiment will begin in earnest with the mission launch in 2024, and continue with the mission’s arrival at Mars in 2026. Until then, “it’s all integration and tests,” on the spacecraft, and integrating subsystems into the whole, Lillis said. “We’re working diligently towards that launch next year.”

Corrections (8/4/2023): This article has been updated to: include further sourcing for the budget figure; clarify that Parker supported NASA’s GRAIL mission while employed at JPL, not Advanced Space; clarify modifications made during the design process; clarify the costs of the Deep Space Network. SpaceRef regrets the errors.