WASHINGTON — A pair of small satellites built by Rocket Lab for a NASA mission to Mars have arrived in Florida for a launch this fall on the maiden flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.
NASA Launch Services Program announced on social media on August 18 that the twin spacecraft Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE), which It will study the interaction of the solar wind with the Martian magnetospherehad arrived in Florida for pre-launch preparations. The satellites had been shipped from a Rocket Lab factory in Long Beach, California, several days earlier.
The ESCAPADE spacecraft is scheduled to launch to Mars sometime this fall on the first flight of New Glenn. Unlike previous Mars missions, neither NASA nor the other companies and organizations involved in ESCAPADE have revealed a specific launch date or even a launch window for the mission, though industry sources say the mission is targeting a launch sometime in October, if New Glenn is ready.
Rocket Lab will spend the next three weeks doing final prelaunch processing on the spacecraft, said Christophe Mandy, the company’s principal systems engineer, during an Aug. 9 press tour of the Long Beach facility as the spacecraft was being prepared for shipment. That includes performance testing to confirm the spacecraft was not damaged during transit, as well as loading the spacecraft with nitrogen, helium and propellants. “Once all of that is done, we’ll be ready to go.”
New Glenn will not send the two ESCAPADE spacecraft directly to Mars, but rather into an extended Earth orbit, from where the spacecraft will use their own thrusters to head toward Mars. “The trajectory is really good because none of the burns are critical until MOI, Mars orbit insertion,” he said. The spacecraft will arrive at Mars and perform that critical MOI burn about 11 months after launch.
Rocket Lab had to develop ESCAPADE without initially knowing what vehicle would launch them. The company came in to redesign the mission after NASA eliminated ESCAPADE as a secondary payload from the Psyche mission launch. NASA used Its Venture Class Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) Acquisition Contract to select New Glenn for launch in February 2023.
“The reason we’re going from Earth orbit to Mars is because we wanted to allow NASA to have the widest possible range of launch options,” Mandy said. That complicated the design of the spacecraft.
“Getting a set of requirements that encompasses many, many launch vehicles is really difficult,” he said. “It made sense in the context of a low-cost mission that NASA wants to do, but it means the amount of work we have to do is a little bit greater than if they specifically identified a single launch vehicle from the beginning.”
Each of the twin spacecraft, named Blue and Gold after the colors of the University of California, Berkeley, which will lead the mission, weighs 524 kilograms, and the scientific payload itself accounts for just eight kilograms. Fuel makes up 70 percent of the spacecraft's mass.
Those limitations influenced the design of the spacecraft. “Our design motto is to achieve absolute efficiency,” he said. “There’s really nothing on the satellite that’s extraneous, complicated or unnecessary, and we typically push the capabilities of the technical side to find some really nice synergies.”
The spacecraft uses Rocket Lab components, from electronics boxes to star trackers to solar panels. ESCAPADE’s main engine, however, comes from ArianeGroup. “Rocket Lab has its own engines, but we’re more interested in the success of the mission than anything else,” Mandy said. “There are these long-duration, very stable, long-established mission engines that came out of other companies, and we just picked one of them.”
The development of ESCAPADE was relatively fast, he said. “We had three and a half years to build two satellites to go to Mars. The typical timeline for a Mars mission is a decade.”
Rocket Lab is incorporating the experience gained from building ESCAPADE into its growing space systems business. The company is currently completing the second of four satellites for Varda Space Industries and is working with Canadian company MDA Space on 17 satellites for the next-generation Globalstar constellation. It is also building 18 Tranche 2 Beta transport layer satellites for the Space Development Agency.
One lesson focused on the supply chain challenges for some ESCAPADE components. “It was difficult to get some of the components, so we had to bring some of them in-house,” he said.
The ESCAPADE spacecraft design could be leveraged for future missions. “That high capability means we will be bidding on that general architecture for other interplanetary proposals, as well as for high delta v, which typically also involve high-energy motions between orbits around Earth.”
“We really tried to build a system that was super efficient from conception to shipping,” he said. “We looked at ways we can do it even better than we have done so far.”
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