Spacecraft · tracked live
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
- From the Sun
- 150,158,103 km (-41,133 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 1,722,919 km (-38,589 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 6 s
- Travelling at
- 29.5 km/s
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
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.