WASHINGTON — A pair of smallsats built by Rocket Lab for a NASA mission to Mars have arrived in Florida for a launch this fall on the inaugural 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 Explorers (ESCAPADE) spacecraft, which will study the interaction of the solar wind with the Martian magnetosphere, had arrived in Florida for pre-launch preparations. The satellites were shipped from a Rocket Lab factory in Long Beach, California, several days earlier.
The ESCAPADE spacecraft are scheduled to launch to Mars some time this fall on the first flight of New Glenn. Contrary to past Mars missions, neither NASA nor the other companies and organizations involved in ESCAPADE have disclosed a specific launch date or even launch period for the mission, although industry sources say the mission is targeting a launch some time in October, if New Glenn is ready.
Rocket Lab will spend the next three weeks doing final prelaunch processing of the spacecraft, said Christophe Mandy, lead systems engineer at the company, during an Aug. 9 media tour at the Long Beach facility as the spacecraft were being prepared for shipment. That includes performance tests to confirm the spacecraft were not damaged during transit as well as loading the spacecraft with nitrogen, helium and propellants. “Once all of that is done, we’re ready.”
New Glenn will not send the two ESCAPADE spacecraft directly to Mars but instead into an extended Earth orbit, from which the spacecraft will use their own thrusters to head towards Mars. “The trajectory is really nice because none of the burns are critical until MOI, Mars orbit insertion,” 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 initially knowing what vehicle would launch them. The company came in to redesign the mission after NASA removed ESCAPADE as a secondary payload from the launch of the Psyche mission. NASA used its Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract to select New Glenn for the launch in February 2023.
“The reason the reason we’re going from Earth orbit to Mars is because we wanted to allow NASA to have as wide a range of possible launch options,” Mandy said. That complicated the design of the spacecraft.
“Getting an all-encompassing set of requirements that covers many, many launch vehicles is actually difficult,” he said. “It made sense in the context of a low-cost mission that NASA wants to do, but it means that the amount of work we have to do is a little bit bigger than if they specifically identified a single launch vehicle from the beginning.”
Each of the twin spacecraft — called Blue and Gold after the colors of the University of California Berkeley, which will run the mission — weighs 524 kilograms, with the science payload itself accounting for just eight kilograms. Propellant makes up 70% of the spacecraft’s mass.
Those constraints influenced the design of the spacecraft. “Our design ethos is to have uncompromising efficiency,” he said. “There’s really nothing on the satellite that is extraneous or complicated or unneeded, and we typically push the capabilities of the technical side in order to find some really good synergies.”
The spacecraft leverages Rocket Lab components, from electronics boxes to star trackers and solar panels. However, the main engine on ESCAPADE came from ArianeGroup. “Rocket Lab has its own engines, but we are more interested in mission success than anything else,” Mandy said. “There are these high heritage, very stable, long duration mission engines that came out of other companies, and we just picked one of those.”
The development of ESCAPADE was relatively quick, he noted. “We had three and a half years to make two satellites to go to Mars. The typical timeline for a Mars mission is a decade.”
Rocket Lab is incorporating the experience from building ESCAPADE into its growing space systems business. The company is currently completing the second of four satellites for Varda Space Industries and working with Canadian company MDA Space on 17 satellites for Globalstar’s next-generation constellation. The company is also building 18 Transport Layer Tranche 2 Beta satellites for the Space Development Agency.
One lesson involved challenges in the supply chain for some ESCAPADE components. “It was difficult to get some of the components, and it resulted in us bringing some of them in house,” he said.
The ESCAPADE spacecraft design itself could be leveraged for future missions. “That high capability means that we will bid with that general architecture on other interplanetary proposals, as well as on high delta v, which typically mean high-energy movements between orbits around Earth as well.”
“We really tried to build was a system that is super efficient from conception to shipping,” he said. “We saw ways in which we can do even better than we have.”
