Reddit AMA With Mars ESCAPADE Team

The AMA is an opportunity to ask about an upcoming milestone — a powered gravity assist around Earth in early November. It’s the first such attempt for any NASA mission.

As the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft prepare to make their final pass close to Earth in early November, three members of the UC Berkeley team leading the NASA mission will answer questions from the public in a one-hour Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit.

Scheduled for 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT Wednesday, Oct. 28, on the u/UCBerkeley channel, it is also an opportunity for reporters to ask questions about the mission’s status and the first powered flyby of Earth by a deep space mission — combining Earth’s gravity with an engine burn — to slingshot a NASA mission to Mars. Questions can be submitted now in advance of the AMA.

The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers mission is led by Robert Lillis of Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. The mission’s two identical spacecraft, Blue and Gold, were launched by NASA on Nov. 13, 2025, and are designed to study the magnetic field of Mars and its interaction with the solar wind to understand how and when the planet lost its atmosphere.

What the scientists learn will also help plan future crewed missions to Mars.

The November loop around Earth combined with an engine burn will propel the spacecraft into a transfer orbit to Mars, with expected arrival in September 2027. The burns, scheduled for Nov. 7 and 9 for Blue and Gold, respectively, mark a crucial test of a new trajectory to Mars. This is the first time NASA has launched a spacecraft to Mars outside the normal window for an efficient trip, which opens up for only a few weeks every 26 months. Instead, the ESCAPADE spacecraft were sent into a loitering orbit near Earth until the ideal launch window arrived, then positioned to slingshot around Earth while firing their engines toward the Red Planet.

No other spacecraft has ever come in from deep space and successfully executed a powered burn around Earth toward deep space

The participants are:

• Robert Lillis, ESCAPADE’s Principal Investigator and associate director for planetary science at Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. He leads the mission’s science and overall direction, setting goals for what the team hopes to learn about Mars.
• Phyllis Whittlesey, ESCAPADE’s scientific lead for the electron electrostatic analyzer instrument and SSL’s associate director of solar and heliophysics. She works on the instruments that will measure Mars’ space environment, and she will analyze the data they collect about Mars and its atmosphere.
• Brett Bonelli, ESCAPADE’s deputy mission operations manager and an SSL engineer. He focuses on monitoring the health of the spacecraft, sending commands from computer consoles in SSL’s Mission Operations Center, or MOC, and responding to anomalies.

Once the Blue and Gold spacecraft slip into orbit around the Red Planet in late 2027, they will give scientists their first stereo view of Mars’ magnetosphere and map the ionosphere and space environment, providing crucial information about Mars’ evolution over the past 4.5 billion years. While the mission’s science instruments, deployable booms and data processing system were built by SSL scientists and their partners, the ESCAPADE spacecraft were built by Rocket Lab USA, headquartered in Long Beach, California.