NASA’s ESCAPADE Ready to Study Space Weather from Earth to Mars - UNIVERSE

An artist’s concept shows the two ESCAPADE spacecraft at Mars. The ESCAPADE mission is the first to coordinate two spacecraft in orbit around a planet other than Earth.

Credits: James Rattray/Rocket Lab USA

Mars is not what it used to be. Once warm, watery, and blanketed by a thick atmosphere, today the Red Planet is cold, dry, and draped by a thin atmospheric veil.

The main culprit is a relentless stream of particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind. Over billions of years, the solar wind has stripped away much of the Martian atmosphere, causing the planet to cool and its surface water to evaporate.

Now, NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission, which launched on Nov. 13, 2025, has turned on the science instruments that will investigate how this happened and how the Sun continues to influence the Red Planet. The science instruments, which are all operating as of Feb. 25, also will study space weather in new ways near Earth and on the way to Mars.

At Mars, ESCAPADE’s findings could also help NASA protect future explorers from the harsh Martian conditions.

“The pioneering ESCAPADE duo will not only investigate the Sun’s role in transforming Mars into an uninhabitable planet, but also will help inform the development of space weather protocols for solar events directed at Mars during future human missions to the Red Planet,” said Joe Westlake, heliophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “By joining the heliophysics fleet of missions across the solar system, ESCAPADE will be another weather station making humans and technology in space safer and more successful.”

NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission launched on Nov. 13, 2025, atop a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Blue Origin

First of its kind

With its twin spacecraft, ESCAPADE is the first science mission to coordinate two orbiters around Mars, gaining a perspective we’ve never had before. Together, the ESCAPADE twins will measure short-term changes in the magnetized environment around Mars, called the magnetosphere, and uncover real-time processes driving the planet’s atmospheric escape.

“Having two spacecraft is going to help us understand cause and effect — how the solar wind, when it comes to Mars, interacts with the magnetic field,” said Michele Cash, ESCAPADE program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

The ESCAPADE orbiters build on earlier Mars missions that have studied Mars' atmosphere, but with just one spacecraft.

“The ESCAPADE mission is a game changer,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator at the University of California, Berkeley. “It gives us what you might call a stereo perspective — two different vantage points simultaneously.”

Once ESCAPADE reaches Mars, its twin spacecraft will follow each other in the same orbit, passing over the same areas at different times to uncover when and where changes are happening.

“When we have two spacecraft crossing those regions in quick succession, we can monitor how those regions vary on timescales as short as two minutes,” Lillis said. “This will allow us to make measurements we could never make before.”

After six months, the two spacecraft will shift into different orbits, with one traveling farther from Mars and the other staying closer to it. Planned to last for five months, this second formation aims to study the solar wind and Martian magnetosphere simultaneously, allowing scientists to investigate how Mars responds to the solar wind in real time.

“Prior spacecraft could either be in the upstream solar wind, or they could be close to the planet measuring its magnetosphere,” Lillis said, “but ESCAPADE allows us to be in two places at once and to simultaneously measure the cause and the effect.”

Preparing for human exploration

When people set foot on Mars, they will not be as well protected from solar radiation as their family and friends on Earth.

Earth can withstand the solar wind’s ceaseless onslaught because it has a hardy magnetic field that shields us from the Sun’s energetic particles. However, Mars’ once robust magnetic field has weakened over time. Today it’s a patchwork of localized magnetism in the planet’s crust along with an ever-changing magnetic field generated by the solar wind’s interaction with charged particles in Mars’ upper atmosphere.

Mars has a hybrid magnetosphere made up of an induced magnetic field from the solar wind and crustal magnetic fields from the planet’s surface. In this artist’s concept yellow lines represent magnetic field lines from the Sun carried by the solar wind and blue lines represent Martian surface magnetic fields. White sparks indicate reconnection activity, where field lines break and reconnect, and red lines are reconnected magnetic fields that link the Martian surface to space.

Anil Rao/Univ. of Colorado/MAVEN/NASA GSFC

This “hybrid” magnetosphere provides little protection against the atmosphere-stripping force of the solar wind. This, plus Mars’ thin atmosphere, allows the Sun’s energetic particles to easily reach the Martian surface, endangering future human explorers there.

“Before we send humans to Mars, we need to understand what type of environment these astronauts are going to encounter,” Cash said.

Additionally, ESCAPADE will provide more information about Mars’ ionosphere — part of the upper atmosphere that future astronauts will use to send radio and navigation signals around the planet, as we do on Earth.

“If we ever want GPS at Mars or long-distance communications, we need to understand the ionosphere,” Lillis said.

Unique journey to Mars

Previous Mars missions have launched when Earth and Mars are aligned in their orbits, which only happens every 26 months. But ESCAPADE launched early, pioneering a new strategy that allows Mars-bound spacecraft to launch almost anytime.

Instead of heading directly to Mars, ESCAPADE’s spacecraft are first looping around a location in space a million miles from Earth called Lagrange point 2. In November 2026, when Earth and Mars are aligned, the ESCAPADE spacecraft will return to Earth and use our planet’s gravity to slingshot themselves toward Mars for a September 2027 arrival.

NASA’s two ESCAPADE spacecraft are not traveling directly from Earth to Mars but are first making a kidney-bean-shaped loop around a location in space called Lagrange point 2 (L2). A small black triangle shows approximately where the spacecraft were on Feb. 24, 2026. In November 2026, when Earth and Mars are more closely aligned in their orbits, the spacecraft will return to Earth and use our planet’s gravity to slingshot their way to Mars.

Advanced Space

This unique “loiter” orbit will extend approximately 2 million miles from our planet, making the ESCAPADE spacecraft the first to fly through a previously unexplored region of Earth’s distant magnetotail, part of Earth’s magnetosphere opposite the Sun.

“We’re going to be doing some discovery science,” Lillis said. “No one has ever measured Earth’s tail this far away.”

The solar wind compresses the Sunward side of Earth’s magnetosphere and stretches the opposite side into a long tail, called the magnetotail. The two ESCAPADE spacecraft (indicated here in cyan) will be the first to fly through the distant part of Earth’s magnetotail, about 1.2 million miles from Earth, before heading to Mars.

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

Later, during their 10-month cruise to Mars, ESCAPADE’s two spacecraft will study solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic environment that Mars-bound astronauts will also traverse, preparing for future journeys to the Red Planet.

The ESCAPADE mission is funded by NASA’s Heliophysics Division and is part of the NASA Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program. UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory leads the mission with key partners Rocket Lab; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Advanced Space; and Blue Origin.

by Vanessa Thomas

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Source: NASA’s ESCAPADE Ready to Study Space Weather from Earth to Mars - NASA Science

Irrigation gaps in weather models could skew air quality forecasts, study finds - Earth - Earth Sciences - Environment

An eddy-covariance flux tower near irrigated cotton fields in San Joaquin Valley was installed in August 2023 at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources experimental fields to continuously measure exchanges of heat, moisture and momentum between the land surface and atmosphere. Credit: Fan Wu

Outdoor air pollution is estimated to contribute to more than 100,000 premature deaths in the United States each year, according to the National Weather Service. Accurate air quality forecasts—designed to protect public health, alerting communities to dangerous levels of pollutants linked to asthma attacks, heart disease and premature death—are critical for helping people limit exposure and for guiding regulatory action.

However, a new study led by Fan Wu, a doctoral student in Penn State's Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, suggests some of the computer models that agencies rely on may not be getting it right. Wu and the multi-institutional team found that models used to predict air pollution can seriously misrepresent how heat and moisture move between farmland and the atmosphere, potentially skewing air quality forecasts used for policy decisions.

The study, published in the journal Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, evaluated how well the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model—a widely used regulatory weather model—simulates surface fluxes, which are the exchanges of heat, moisture and momentum between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere. These fluxes directly influence the atmospheric boundary layer, the lowest part of the atmosphere that interacts with the surface and contains the air people breathe. The depth and mixing of that layer are crucial in determining how pollutants such as fine particles (PM 2.5) and ozone build up or disperse.

The team evaluated the Pleim-Xiu Land Surface Model (PX LSM), a land module within WRF used by air quality agencies in California and the Mid-Atlantic region, including Pennsylvania and Maryland. The researchers ran WRF simulations and compared the results to yearlong, real-world measurements collected from 16 flux towers that directly measure heat and moisture exchanges across California's San Joaquin Valley and the Mid-Atlantic.

The team found that the model performs very differently in the two regions.

Large errors over irrigated California fields

In California's San Joaquin Valley, the model makes irrigated farm fields appear far too hot and dry. During summer daylight hours, it overestimates the heat flowing from the surface to the air—known as sensible heat flux—by about 260 watts per square meter, or 274%. It also underestimates the cooling effect from evaporation—latent heat flux—by about 200 watts per square meter, or 68%, especially during spring and summer daylight hours. The problem stems from the model's exclusion of irrigation, meaning it does not capture how added water cools and moistens the surface.

"These significant heat flux errors over irrigated fields can distort air quality forecasts," Wu said. "If the model puts too much heat into the atmosphere, it makes the atmospheric boundary layer too deep, giving pollutants in the model more room to dilute. That can lead to underestimates of pollution near the surface, where people breathe."

Mid-Atlantic fares better but not perfectly

In the Mid-Atlantic, model errors were smaller and more balanced. The system tended to slightly overestimate both heating and evaporation, running too hot over cities and somewhat too wet over vegetated areas. However, overall, it captured surface–atmosphere exchanges more realistically than in California.

Across both regions, the researchers also found that the model overestimates how strongly the surface slows and stirs the wind during the daytime, with mixed performance at night. The findings point to broader challenges in how the model represents surface–atmosphere interactions. The researchers said the results also suggest that including a representation of irrigation, perhaps by integrating space-based observations of vegetation and soil moisture, could strengthen air quality forecasts in heavily farmed regions.

Next steps to improve forecasting tools

"If WRF better represented irrigation and land use details, we would expect more accurate simulations of daytime PM2.5 and ozone concentrations in state modeling systems, which could help agencies create more effective plans to reduce pollution," Wu said.

According to Ken Davis, professor of meteorology and atmospheric science and research team member, the next step is determining whether improving how models represent irrigation leads to better air quality forecasts—and whether those improvements are practical for states to adopt.

"We're testing whether tools like NASA's Land Information System or a simpler irrigation module can reduce the surface heat flux errors we identified," Davis said. "First, we need to show that these approaches improve the weather model. Then we need to determine whether states can realistically implement them. If they can, adoption should be straightforward."

Davis added that the team must make sure that improving the meteorology actually improves the air quality simulation.

"Sometimes these complex systems contain compensating errors," Davis said. "If better surface modeling improves both the weather and air quality simulations—and early signs in the San Joaquin Valley suggest it does—then we're headed in the right direction." 

by Kevin Sliman, Pennsylvania State University

edited by Stephanie Baum, reviewed by Robert Egan

Provided by Pennsylvania State University 

Source: Irrigation gaps in weather models could skew air quality forecasts, study finds