NASA's twin ESCAPADE Mars probes have completed powered Earth flybys after a year in a looping 'loiter' orbit and are now on a path toward the Red Planet, Space.com reported¹.

The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers launched in November 2025 on the second flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket¹. They did not head straight to Mars; mission planners designed a kidney-bean trajectory around the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 so the spacecraft would return to Earth in early November 2026¹.

ESCAPADE had been meant to launch in October 2024 during a favorable Earth-Mars alignment that occurs about every 26 months, but New Glenn delays forced the team to skip that window¹. Rather than wait until this fall, NASA chose the loiter path¹.

At Earth, each probe had to fire its engines inside the planet's gravity well to strengthen a slingshot, Space.com said¹. Asal Naseri, acting associate flight director for NASA's Heliophysics Division, said it was the first time NASA had used a powered Earth flyby to send a spacecraft toward Mars, and that the team had executed the maneuver twice in two days¹.

Rob Lillis of the University of California, Berkeley, the mission's principal investigator, said no NASA mission had done this before and that for most missions it is not necessary¹. After a few minor course corrections, arrival is planned for September 2027¹.

Each spacecraft is about the size of two refrigerators and carries three science instruments and cameras to study Mars's magnetic field, created by solar particles interacting with the atmosphere and by magnetic crust¹. During the detour they also measured Earth's distant magnetotail, including at about 1.19 million miles (1.91 million kilometers) from Earth, and later joined twin ARTEMIS-THEMIS spacecraft for a four-point observation, Lillis said¹.