# ESCAPADE Blue

*Spacecraft*

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 | 151,141,522 km (-17,545 km/d) |
| From the Earth | 2,438,355 km (-1,533 km/d) |
| A signal takes | 8 s |
| Travelling at | 29.6 km/s |

Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of 2026-09-05, changing at the rate given beside each. The interpolation itself is good to a few kilometres; what ages these figures is the date, not the arithmetic.

## Elsewhere

- On the live map: https://www.orbitalmap.space/?world=solar-system&focus=escapade-blue
- The mission's own page: https://escapade.ssl.berkeley.edu/
- This object as a page: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/escapade-blue/
- Every object: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/
- What this site is and what it reads: https://www.orbitalmap.space/llms.txt