While people around the world benefit from the aurora borealis from our active sun, recent solar activity has disappointed Mars exploration fans. Due to inclement weather in space, they will now have to wait for the two Red Planet-bound spacecraft to be launched aboard Blue Origin rockets.
NASA’s twin-engine ESCAPADE spacecraft was scheduled to fly to Mars as early as this afternoon (November 12), but due to high solar activity, the mission will have to wait until an undetermined date, Blue Origin officials said in a post on social platform X. The mission has already been delayed several times from its scheduled October 2024 launch date due to technical and scheduling issues, and its most recent launch attempt on November 9 was canceled due to Earth’s weather.
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ESCAPADE (short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) is a NASA-managed mission using two spacecraft built by California-based aerospace company Rocket Lab. The spacecraft will fly aboard Blue Origin’s 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket, which is designed for orbital and interplanetary missions like the Mars mission.
Ironically, ESCAPADE is designed to study the same space weather that is holding it back. The Sun’s solar activity has an 11-year cycle and will reach its peak in 2025. When the sun ejects large, fast-moving clouds of plasma known as coronal mass ejections, this electrically charged material causes auroras when the particles interact with Earth’s magnetic field lines and atmosphere. Severe solar storms can also affect satellites and power lines, so NASA and other groups are diligently monitoring the skies.
ESCAPADE will investigate how this cosmic weathering and the solar wind (the constant stream of charged particles that the sun pumps into the solar system) stripped Mars of its thick ancient atmosphere. Scientists believe that as the atmosphere thinned, the surface water dried up, leaving Mars largely a desert world, save for polar ice and suspected underground water reserves.
The approximately $80 million ESCAPADE is not the only payload onboard New Glenn. Inside the rocket’s second stage is a telemetry communications experiment for Viasat, which flies on behalf of NASA’s Communications Services Project, Blue Origin officials said in a report on Live Science’s sister website Space.com.
New Glenn has only been used once so far, on the NG-1 mission in January. Its first stage is designed to land on a barge in the ocean so it can be reused. However, during a mission in January, the ship failed to land from a barge and was lost.
Blue Origin also plans to eventually use New Glenn for lunar exploration, carrying both humans and scientific equipment to the moon’s surface aboard the yet-to-be-flown Blue Moon lander.
Rival aerospace company SpaceX is currently tasked with making the first manned landing for NASA’s Artemis moon program, which could happen with its Starship as early as 2027. However, due to delays in Starship development, NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy recently suggested that the Artemis 3 contract could be restarted with Blue Origin and others.
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