Spacecraft
ESCAPADE Blue
One of two identical small spacecraft - Blue and Gold - launched together in November 2025 to measure how the solar wind strips the air off Mars, a planet with no global magnetic field to hold it - only patches of magnetised crust and the field the wind induces as it arrives. Two of them, because a single craft cannot tell a change in the wind from a change in place: reading the same surroundings from two points at once separates the two. Built for under eighty million dollars, which for a mission to another planet is remarkable.
- Agency
- NASA / UC Berkeley
- Launched
- 2025-11-13 - still working
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.