The tireless operations team of NASA’s ESCAPADE mission—comprised of flight operations specialists and technicians with the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) and spacecraft manufacturer Rocket Lab—have been working around the clock since the twin spacecraft (Blue and Gold) launched on November 13 on Blue Origin’s New Glenn 2 rocket. About five hours later, Blue and Gold called home via the NASA Deep Space Network, and the operations team got busy commissioning the spacecraft and their instruments.
One of those instruments, the VISible and Infrared Observation System (VISIONS) camera provided by Northern Arizona University, was brought online and tested shortly after launch. ESCAPADE is now loitering at Lagrange point 2 (just over 1 million kilometers from Earth), and there’s not much to see out there, so Gold used VISIONS to snap a selfie (taken at about 885,000 km away). On November 21, VISIONS captured a visible light image of ESCAPADE’s port side solar panel and then took the same shot in infrared (IR).
“I felt like a little kid when I heard about the photo,” said Robert Lillis, an associate director for planetary science at SSL and principal investigator on ESCAPADE. “To see the solar panel in the photo, knowing it’s more than 1 million km away, was awesome.”
The science team’s analysis of the sensitivity of these images suggests that VISIONS will likely be able to observe auroras in the Martian atmosphere from orbit. The IR camera will allow the science team to measure how surface temperatures on Mars change across day and night and through seasonal cycles.
Commissioning will continue for another month, at which point, Rocket Lab will hand over all mission operations to SSL, which will prepare Blue and Gold for a slingshot orbit of Earth in November 2026 that will provide the speed boost necessary to reach Mars orbit in 2027.
These images were obtained and distributed thanks to the efforts of SSL, Northern Arizona University, Rocket Lab and NASA.