The launch of ESCAPADE is scheduled to occur no earlier than fall on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.
Rob Lillis is the ESCAPADE Principal Investigator and Associate Director for Planetary Science at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory.
The ESCAPADE mission is conducted in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory.
ESCAPADE is designed to deliver high-value planetary science at lower cost and on faster timelines.
ESCAPADE aims to deliver critical Mars science at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional billion-dollar missions.
NASA projects launching ESCAPADE as soon as spring 2025 on another New Glenn launch.
Rocket Lab designed, built, integrated, and tested the ESCAPADE spacecraft for the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory and NASA.
The ESCAPADE mission is a heliophysics mission scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in 2024 to measure plasma and magnetic fields around Mars.
NASA awarded a task order in February 2023 valued at $20,000,000 to procure the launch of the ESCAPADE spacecraft on New Glenn.
If ESCAPADE launches this fall, the two spacecraft will arrive at Mars 48 hours apart in 2025-09-01 and begin a one-year prime science mission in 2026-04-01.
NASA selected ESCAPADE in 2019 as part of its SIMPLEx line of planetary science smallsat missions alongside Janus and Lunar Trailblazer.
Nick Benardini listed a 2024-09-29 launch date for the ESCAPADE mission during his 2024-04-24 COSPAR presentation.
NASA selected Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to launch ESCAPADE and awarded Blue Origin a $20,000,000 task order through the agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare contract in February 2023 for the mission.
The payload for New Glenn’s first launch is anticipated to be NASA's ESCAPADE smallsat mission.
NASA acquired a launch for ESCAPADE on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket using the VADR contract, and that launch is scheduled for late 2024 as the first flight of New Glenn.
NASA selected Blue Origin in February to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission to Mars.
A federal procurement database lists the Blue Origin contract for ESCAPADE at $20,000,000.
Bradley Smith, director of NASA’s Launch Services Office, indicated at a 2023-11-20 NASA Advisory Council meeting that the ESCAPADE launch was scheduled for about one year and that his charts listed an 2024-08-01 launch date for ESCAPADE.
The University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory leads ESCAPADE with spacecraft provided by Rocket Lab.
NASA will provide a Blue Origin New Glenn launch vehicle to carry the two ESCAPADE spacecraft to low Earth orbit in 2024.