NASA launches 'How Mars died' mission on Sunday aboard New Glenn rocket

NASA is gearing up for a Mars mission aboard Blue Origin’s New Glenn Rocket, aiming to uncover how Mars “died.”

This launch will mark the rocket’s second flight since its debut in January 2025 and its first interplanetary mission for NASA.

This Sunday, a pair of identical satellites will launch to uncover how the Red Planet lost its thick atmosphere and water-seeking to answer the primordial question: ‘How did Mars die?’

The liftoff is scheduled for earlier Sunday, November 9, 2025. 

Aboard the spacecraft nicknamed Blue and Gold, which is set to launch to Mars.

Their mission, named ESCAPADE (short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers), will see the two spacecraft orbit the Red Planet in tandem after launching from Florida aboard a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket.

The mission marks NASA's first dual-satellite mission to another planet and aims to create a 3D view of how the solar wind, the stream of charged particles from the sun, energizes and strips away Martian air.

This mission is NASA’s first to send a dual-satellite pair to another planet. Its goal is to build a 3D map showing how the solar wind strips away Mars’s atmosphere.

Previous Mars missions, including Mars Global, MAVEN, and the Emirates Mars Mission Hope, have shown that Mars lacks a global magnetic field but retains patchy magnetic “bubbles” locked into its crust.

However, studying this with a single satellite has been like trying to understand a storm by watching one cloud at a time. The twin ESCAPADE probes will provide the first simultaneous, 3D view.