NASA's newest mission hopes to learn how and why Mars became a dead planet

A new NASA mission is sending twin spacecraft toward Mars to watch the planet’s upper atmosphere as space weather hits it in real time. The ESCAPADE mission to Mars launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Nov. 13, 2025.

The goal is to see how charged particles from the Sun peel away Mars’ thin air, effectively “killing” the Red Planet. Those measurements should help explain how a once wetter planet turned into the dry place we see today.

How Mars lost its atmosphere

The work is led by Rob Lillis, a planetary space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL). He focuses on Mars’ atmospheric escape, crustal magnetism, and the way solar particles affect the planet.

Long ago, Mars likely had thicker air and liquid water at the surface. The atmospheric escape, gradual loss of gas from a planet into space, is a prime suspect for why that changed over billions of years.

How much air a planet keeps depends on its gravity, temperature, and how active its star is. Mars is smaller and cooler than Earth, so light gases at the top of its atmosphere are easier to remove over time.

What Mars ESCAPADE will study

The solar wind, a fast stream of charged particles blowing outward from the Sun, constantly sweeps past Mars. With no strong global magnetic field to deflect it, Mars’ upper atmosphere sits exposed to this flow.

A NASA overview explains that the mission uses small satellites to sample Mars’ upper atmosphere and magnetic environment from different paths.

They will sweep from about 100 to 6,200 miles above the surface, letting scientists see how conditions change with height.

Each craft carries instruments that count charged particles, track electric and magnetic fields, and record how fast the rarefied gas moves.

Those readings will map the magnetosphere, the region where a planet’s magnetic fields meet the solar wind, in three dimensions.

ESCAPADE will also watch how that environment responds when the Sun gets more active. By catching calm days and stormy days, the team can see which conditions do the most damage to the atmosphere.

Riding to Mars on New Glenn

For this mission, NASA turned to a newer commercial heavy rocket instead of flying on one of its older designs.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn provided the ride to space under a program that buys dedicated launches from private companies.

The booster then touched down on the ship Jacklyn in the Atlantic Ocean, an important test of the rocket’s reuse plan.

Instead of racing straight toward Mars, the spacecraft will loop near Earth’s Lagrange point 2, a gravitational balance spot roughly a million miles away. From there, a gravity assist in 2026 will swing the mission onto its final path to the Red Planet.

Life needs an atmosphere

A thick atmosphere helps a planet keep warmth, support surface water, and block harmful radiation. Mars lost much of that protection, so the surface is now cold, dry, and exposed to high energy particles from space.

The space weather, changing streams of particles and radiation from the Sun, can damage electronics and raise radiation doses for future crews.

By watching how those conditions stress Mars’ atmosphere in real time, ESCAPADE helps planners estimate safer routes and shelter times for human explorers.

Lessons from Mars also feed into studies of planets around other stars, where astronomers often see only hints of an atmosphere.

Knowing how fast air can disappear from a rocky world helps them judge whether distant planets might stay comfortable enough for life to start.

What earlier missions already found

“Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time,” said Bruce Jakosky of MAVEN.

Measurements taken by MAVEN show that the solar wind strips about one quarter pound of gas from Mars each second. 

One study used nine years of MAVEN data to spot sputtering, where ions from the solar wind knock atmospheric atoms into space.

Those results suggest that this process may have been even stronger in the past, when the young Sun was more active.

ESCAPADE and NASA’s Mars strategy

MAVEN watches Mars from a single orbiter, so it often guesses whether changes come from shifting conditions or different positions along its path.

ESCAPADE adds another viewpoint, so scientists can separate those effects and build more detailed maps of the charged gas around Mars.

ESCAPADE belongs to NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program (SIMPLEx), which tests whether low cost projects can return rich scientific data from planets. The mission is funded by the agency’s heliophysics division.

Scientists plan to fold ESCAPADE data into computer models of the Martian space environment that already draw on MAVEN and other missions.

Those models can be adapted for worlds such as icy moons or asteroids, where the balance between atmospheres and solar radiation may differ.

Mars lessons from ESCAPADE

After that swing past Earth, the two craft will cruise for 11 months and then fire engines to slip into orbit around Mars.

Mission planners expect them to arrive days apart, then reshape their paths until each orbit takes roughly 9 hours.

Once the satellites settle into orbits, they will spend a year measuring how storms from the Sun pump energy into Mars’ upper atmosphere.

This information will help engineers design shields, or plan safer routes, for robotic and crewed missions that must face the space environment.

Image credits: James Rattray/Rocket Lab USA.

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