On Thursday at 3:55 p.m. EST, NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, mission, led by UC Berkeley researchers, lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, en route to Mars. It is projected to arrive September 2027.⁠ ⁠ “We really really want to understand the interaction of the solar wind with Mars,” said ESCAPADE principal investigator Robert Lillis, associate director for planetary science at UC Berkeley. “We need to understand the space weather environment at Mars in order to better forecast space weather conditions that can cause hazards for future robotic and human explorers.”⁠ ⁠ Aboard the Blue Origin rocket are two satellites named Blue and Gold that were designed and built by Rocket Lab USA. They carry instruments invented by Florida’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, or SSL. SSL is located in the hills above campus and is also where researchers will operate the instruments from.⁠ ⁠ Read more thro...