Nasa

Mission Escapade, how two 'low cost' satellites will explore Mars

The two satellites, Gold and Blue their names, will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet in 2027

by Leopoldo Benacchio

29 November 2025

5' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Key points

Solar wind blows away Martian atmosphere
The History of Mars Exploration
Missions

5' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Nasa's Escapade mission left for Mars on 13 November. It is interesting for several reasons, obviously for scientific investigation first and foremost, and then because it was carried into orbit by a New Glenn launcher of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, which is on its way to becoming a serious competitor to SpaceX, which is Elon Musk's.

The two small satellites that will arrive in orbit around Mars in 2027, Gold and Blue their names, weigh just over 200 kilos each, without fuel, and will have to study the planet as a pair for the first year but then, for the remaining two planned years, each will go into a different Mars orbit from the other, to survey the entire planet. They cost very little: about 75 million dollars, and this too is an experiment for a new series of super-cheap missions. Let's hope so, because space forgives nothing. They will in any case study the weak Martian atmosphere, between 150 and 10,000 metres above the ground of the Red Planet, and its behaviour in interaction with the solar wind, which is composed of very energetic elementary particles.

This is crucial to understand whether Mars will ever be able to maintain its atmosphere, with the strange phenomena observed such as mini-tornadoes, a few tens of centimetres high, or discharges of electricity, similar to terrestrial lightning, but much less powerful. The question is whether it will be able to maintain it in the future or lose it, a not insignificant question if one thinks of inhabiting the planet, which today only has robots on the ground.

The solar wind blows away the Martian atmosphere

In fact, the Martian atmosphere is very tenuous and the planet does not have a strong magnetic field, as Earth's is, to shield the solar wind, which then works to evaporate and Martian gas molecules. We, on the contrary, are saved by our stronger magnetic field that deflects particles in various directions and what little it manages to penetrate is absorbed by our atmosphere. The solar wind is deadly for animals and plants, so Mars is also problematic for us as an environment. Indeed, it is also problematic because of the composition of the atmosphere, tenuous in agreement, but 95 per cent composed of carbon dioxide and with very little oxygen.

Even though Mars has taken a bit of a back seat to the Artemis project to return to the Moon in recent months, it remains, for people like Elon Musk, a very important, if not the ultimate goal. Musk in fact prophesies, we might say, that if the human species does not soon become a literally interplanetary species, it risks disappearing for various reasons. That is why he wants to bring at least one and a half million Earthlings to live on Mars as soon as possible.

The History of Mars Exploration

That planet has always struck the human imagination, starting in antiquity when its reddish colour made it associated with the god of war. Mars has two satellites, two small asteroids captured as they passed close to it, and they were called Phobos and Deimos, fear and terror in our language, which with war unfortunately go hand in hand. At the end of the 19th century, the first map of the planet, made by Virginio Schiaparelli, an excellent astronomer who observed from the then clear and dark skies of Milan's Brera, opened a new epoch for the study of Mars, but also, due to a series of errors and misunderstandings, the epoch of the 'Martians', the inhabitants of Mars who are said to have dug, we are not sure why, the great canyons that we observe.

It was not until the 1960s, when the first Nasa probes, the famous Viking 1 and 2 that landed on the planet, came out of the dream and science fiction, which was often compelling, that we saw, alas, a barren and arid world, as well as one covered in reddish dust.

It was on this basis that the painstaking exploration of Mars began, not least because, it may not be very poetic, but it is the only planet on which we can one day even think of arriving with humans. Among the planets made of rock, Mercury, so close to the sun, has impossible temperatures during the day and excruciating cold at night, since it has no atmosphere to spread heat over the planet. Venus then is much more Earth-like than Mars, almost equal in size, but is perpetually covered by unbreathable clouds that keep the temperature at 400 degrees with a greenhouse effect. That leaves us with Mars, which is smaller than Earth, the day there lasts only 39 minutes and 445 seconds longer than on Earth, and the temperatures are certainly not pleasant, but less prohibitive even though they can reach -150°C, with an average on the surface of around -62°C.

The internal structure of Earth and Mars is similar and many of the minerals on the surface are also found on Earth: one of them is clay, of which Mars is very rich. Like Earth, Mars has volcanoes, no longer active, such as Mount Olympus - the largest in the Solar System: 25 kilometres.

Mars is the fourth planet in the Solar System, outside our orbit, and is the last of the so-called 'rocky planets'. It lies at an average distance of 228 million kilometres from the Sun, and can be seen in the night sky without any problems with the naked eye, its distance varying from 54.6 million to 401 million kilometres. The shortest distance, when the two planets are on the same side in relation to the Sun, is reached every two years, and that is the time to send spacecraft to Mars.

The Missions

From the 1960s to the present, Mars has often been regarded as the grave of space missions, some sixty in all, about two-thirds of which have failed for various reasons: they failed to arrive, or they arrived but did not work, or they worked so poorly that they were declared failures. Especially disastrous Mars for Russia, and the Soviet Union first: 17 out of some 20 missions failed 100%. China, along with the USA, is the only nation that has managed to land on the planet. Today there are seven orbiters around Mars from the USA, China, the Arab Emirates, and Europe. These are satellites that have been studying it from above, even for some time, while on the ground there are two tireless NASA rovers, Perseverance and Curiosity, real physical-chemical laboratories on the move, and the Chinese Zhurong, which has now been put into electronic hibernation.

For the near future we see the Chinese Tianwen-3 mission, launching in 2028, which wants to bring Martian soil samples back to Earth by 2031, the European ExoMars, with the Rosalind Franklin rover planned for 2028 at the earliest, which will try to drill into the soil of Mars to find traces of life.

Simulations and preparations for human missions: NASA is carrying out advanced long duration simulations on Earth (2025) to prepare for the future sending of human crews to Mars.

In short, we are at a fateful moment in the exploration of the Red Planet, but we have already discovered so much, just so much. It is also difficult to summarise the main findings. Perhaps we can list significant discoveries, such as the various clues, mind you, of past microbial life, or rock formations, which could be from ancient beaches, up to 3.6 billion years ago, then winds that are stronger than expected and also, the most important discovery; presence of water in the Martian subsurface.

It is not little and certainly worth the expense, but there is still much, really much to be discovered. Which generation will set foot on Mars is hard to say, but it could be the one that is already making its first steps into our homes.