Blue Origin has successfully deployed its first mission to Mars in more than five years. It’s an important step toward the future conquest of the Red Planet, which is of great interest to bigwigs like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. After a series of delays, the two ships that made up the mission They are already in space on a journey of about two years to Earth.
With this mission, NASA aims to study how the sun affects Mars’ magnetic environment. The ultimate goal is to prepare for future human exploration of the Red Planet, and to do that we need to learn more about its eerie landscape.
The recent delay before the mission was finally able to take off was precisely due to solar activity. In addition to leaving impressive aurora borealis behind, the solar storm that hit Earth also put rocket systems at risk. Finally, the ESCAPADE (Explorers Escape, Acceleration and Plasma Dynamics) spacecraft It launched toward Mars at 9:55 p.m. spanish time This Thursday, November 13th, I’ll be heading to the peninsula aboard the Blue Origin New Glenn Rocket.
“This heliophysics mission will help us understand how Mars became a desert planet and how solar flares affect its surface,” said Sean Duffy, who remains NASA’s acting administrator.
“Understanding Mars’ space weather is a key priority for future missions because it helps protect the system. Robots and above all humans in extreme environments”. said Nikki Fox, deputy administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
heading to mars
After spacecraft deployment, ground controllers for the ESCAPADE mission established communications with both spacecraft at 10:35 p.m. EST. Rather than heading directly to Mars, the two spacecraft will first head to a point in space called Lagrangian point 2, about 1 million miles from Earth.
Currently, Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun, making travel between the two planets difficult. The spacecraft ESCAPADE will return to Earth in November 2026, when the orbits of Earth and Mars will closely match. They use Earth’s gravity to propel them towards Mars.
The two twin spacecraft built by Rocket Lab will investigate how a constant stream of particles from the Sun (known as the solar wind) traveling at millions of kilometers per hour gradually eroded much of Mars’ atmosphere, causing the planet to cool and water to evaporate on its surface.
retrieve the rocket
The rocket’s second stage continues forward to carry Escapade into space, while New Glenn’s first stage It began a series of deceleration maneuvers in an attempt to land on Blue Origin’s recovery ship, Jacquelin.was waiting in the Atlantic Ocean about 604 kilometers away.
Blue Origin attempted a similar landing during New Glenn’s first launch in January, but failed. At this time, seven minutes after takeoff, three of the New Glenn rocket’s seven BE-4 engines were restarted as it passed through Earth’s atmosphere. Two minutes later, it made a powered landing, landing vertically on top of Jacklin, named after founder Jeff Bezos’ mother.
This makes Blue Origin the second company in history to recover a rocket during an operational flight. This is a common practice at Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX, which Jeff Bezos wants to compete as a supplier to NASA and other private projects.
New Glenn also demonstrated Viasat Inc.’s space communications technology. The technology could be used in a successor to NASA’s previous Telemetry and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRS).
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