A pair of small satellites built by Rocket Lab for NASA’s Mars mission have arrived in Florida this fall to launch on the maiden flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. NASA’s Launch Services Program announced on social media Aug. 18 that the twin Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorer (ESCAPADE) spacecraft, which will study the interaction of the solar wind with the Martian magnetosphere, were in Florida in preparation for launch. The satellites were launched a few days earlier from Rocket Lab’s facility in Long Beach, California.

The ESCAPADE spacecraft is scheduled to launch to Mars this fall on New Glenn’s maiden flight. Unlike past Mars missions, neither NASA nor the other companies and organizations involved in ESCAPADE have announced a specific launch date or even a launch window for the mission, but industry sources say the mission is planned to launch in October if New Glenn is completed.

Rocket Lab will spend the next three weeks performing final pre-launch work on the spacecraft, Christoph Mendy, the company’s lead systems engineer, said during a media tour of its Long Beach facility on Aug. 9 as the spacecraft prepares for launch. That includes loading the spacecraft with nitrogen, helium and propellants, along with performance tests to verify that the spacecraft was not damaged during the transition. “Once that’s all done, we’ll be ready,” he said.

New Glenn will not send two ESCAPADE spacecraft directly to Mars, but instead into an advanced Earth orbit where the spacecraft will use their own engines to navigate to Mars. “The orbit is really good because none of the burns are critical until MOI gets into Mars orbit,” he said. The spacecraft will arrive at Mars and perform that critical MOI burn about 11 months after launch.

Rocket Lab had to develop ESCAPADE without knowing what vehicle would launch them. The company undertook a redesign of the mission after NASA removed ESCAPADE as a booster payload following the launch of the Psyche mission. NASA used the Venture Acquisition Dedicated and Shared Drive (VADR) contract to select New Glenn for a February 2023 launch.

“The reason we went from Earth orbit to Mars is we wanted to allow NASA to have as wide a range of possible launch options as possible,” Mandy said. This complicated the design of the spacecraft.

“It’s really hard to get a comprehensive set of requirements that covers multiple launch vehicles,” he said. “It made sense in the context of a low-cost mission that NASA wanted to do, but it meant the amount of work we had to do was a little bit more than if they had specifically defined one launch vehicle from the beginning.”

The twin spacecraft, named blue and gold after the University of California, Berkeley, which will lead the mission, each weigh 524 kilograms, with the science payload itself weighing just eight kilograms. Fuel makes up 70% of the spacecraft’s mass.

These limitations influenced the spacecraft’s design. “Our design ethos is efficiency without compromise,” he said. “There’s nothing really extraneous, complicated or unnecessary in a satellite, and we often push the technical side to find really good synergies.”

The spacecraft uses Rocket Lab components, from electronics boxes to star trackers to solar panels. But ESCAPADE’s main engine came from ArianeGroup. “Rocket Lab has its own engines, but we’re more concerned with mission success than anything else,” Mandy said. “There are older, very stable engines from other companies for long-duration missions, and we went with one of those.”

He noted that ESCAPADE’s development was relatively rapid. “We had three and a half years to create two satellites to fly to Mars. The typical time frame for a mission to Mars is ten years.”

Rocket Lab is leveraging ESCAPADE’s expertise in its growing space systems business. The company is currently completing the second of four satellites for Varda Space Industries and is working with Canada’s MDA Space on 17 satellites for the next-generation Globalstar constellation. The company is also building 18 Transport Layer Slice 2 Beta satellites for the Space Development Agency.

One class covered supply chain issues for some ESCAPADE components. “Some of the components were difficult to obtain, which led to us bringing some in-house,” he said.

The ESCAPADE spacecraft’s design could be used for future missions. “This high capability means we will be bidding on this common architecture for high delta v as well as other interplanetary proposals, which typically also means transporting high energy between Earth orbits.”

“We really tried to build a super-efficient system from design to delivery,” he said. “We found we could do better than what we had.”