NASA's twin ESCAPADE spacecraft to slingshot past Earth on a first-of-its-kind route to Mars

Two NASA spacecraft are about to swing past Earth and fire their engines to fling themselves towards Mars, a manoeuvre no Mars-bound mission has successfully flown before.

The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft will each perform a "powered flyby" of Earth, combining our planet's gravity with an engine burn to slingshot towards the Red Planet. The first is due around 5am Eastern time (10am UK time) on Saturday 7 November, and the second two days later, around 6am Eastern time (11am UK time) on Monday 9 November.

A new route to Mars

Missions to Mars normally launch when Earth and Mars are aligned, which happens only every 26 months, to keep the journey short and save fuel. ESCAPADE launched in November 2025, when the two planets were on opposite sides of the Sun.

Instead of heading straight to Mars, the spacecraft looped around a point in space called the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2, then headed back towards Earth to use its gravity once the planets were lined up again, which is now.

At closest approach, each spacecraft will fire its engine for about nine minutes, increasing its speed by more than 1,000 miles per hour, from about 6.3 to 6.7 miles per second. At that speed, NASA says, it could cross the United States from Washington DC to San Francisco in under seven minutes.

Bonus science on the way

The unusual route has already paid off. The spacecraft flew through a distant part of Earth's magnetotail, the region of Earth's magnetic field stretched out by the solar wind, which no spacecraft had directly explored before. Mission scientists say they saw interesting activity and plan to share their findings soon.

Arriving in 2027

After the flybys, the two spacecraft face a ten-month cruise, arriving at Mars on 7 and 9 September 2027. There, ESCAPADE will become the first mission to fly multiple spacecraft in formation around Mars.

Its job is to study how the solar wind, a stream of material flowing from the Sun at a million miles an hour, interacts with the Martian environment and strips away its atmosphere, helping explain how Mars changed from a world that once had water to the dry planet we see today.

Can you see it?

Each spacecraft is about the size of a fridge and will pass between 600 and 1,100 miles above the surface. NASA says they will be faint, and a telescope will most likely be needed. The best views will be from the western United States, so for skywatchers in Birmingham the next best thing is to follow the mission online.

Several days after the burns, the team will know how well the spacecraft are aimed, and will make course corrections on the way to Mars.