NG-2 Slated For Liftoff November 9 From Cape Canaveral

Blue Origin’s New Glenn, a heavy-lift reusable rocket, is scheduled to lift off on its second mission, NG-2, on Sunday November 9, during a 2.5-hour window that opens at 2:45 pm EST, from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, sending the NASA ESCAPADE twin spacecraft on their mission to Mars.

ESCAPADE, or ESCape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorer, consists of two spacecraft dubbed Blue and Gold, for the colors of the University of California, Berkeley, who will be operating the twin vehicles, which were built by Rocket Lab.

The New Glenn rocket will launch the spacecraft toward the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), a gravitationally stable point in space in line with the Sun but 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) beyond Earth. Satellites and spacecraft can orbit around Lagrange points, and in fact that’s what the ESCAPADE probes will do for about 12 months studying space weather.

After that in November 2026, the Blue and Gold probes will swing by Earth and get a gravitational boost to start on their way to Mars. They will arrive at the Red Planet about 10 months later in March 2027, and then perform seven months of orbital maneuvers to lower into precisely aligned orbits for gathering data.

UC-Berkeley wrote in the mission description that the orbiters will "fly in formation to map the magnetic fields, upper atmosphere and ionosphere of Mars in 3D, providing the first stereo view of the Red Planet’s unique near-space environment."

Robert Lillis, ESCAPADE Principal Investigator of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory said, “Understanding how the ionosphere varies will be a really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in radio signals that we will need to communicate with each other and to navigate on Mars.”

FMI:  www.nasa.gov/ , news.berkeley.edu/