During a solar storm, the sun unleashes a torrent of radiation into space.
If you're on Earth, the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field shield you against the most harmful health impacts. But if you were on Mars some 140 million miles away, how those gusts of energy would affect you and the rest of the Red Planet are less clear.
Scientists know Mars once had a much thicker atmosphere, perhaps one capable of supporting life. But the planet's climate has changed dramatically over billions of years, from an Earth-like world bathed in lakes and rivers to an arid desert. The question is where did the atmosphere go?
A new NASA-funded science mission will get to the bottom of how solar radiation strips away the tattered Martian atmosphere, and it doesn't involve the usual cast of contractors. The company at the center of this mission is Rocket Lab, started in New Zealand in 2006.
Of all the new space ventures, that name might come as a surprise, given how relatively unknown the company is to the general public — and how obsessed its competitor SpaceX, or rather its founder Elon Musk, is with getting to Mars.
"I always joke that we're the only non-billionaire led space company right now," Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, told Mashable. "Our two biggest competitors are the two wealthiest people on the planet, and — most unfortunate for our PR and comms department — I'm probably a really boring kind of CEO. I don't post controversial things and don't do crazy stuff. I'm just trying to build rockets."
Not just rockets, though. Rocket Lab built two spacecraft for the upcoming Mars mission, Escapade, short for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers. The pair are expected to launch this October.
If successful, the mission could set an example for how NASA and the commercial space industry approach interplanetary missions at a lower cost in the future. From soup to nuts, Escapade had a budget of $80 million, under NASA's Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (Simplex) program. Rocket Lab built the twin probes in just 3.5 years for $57 million, a bargain basement price relative to the multi-billions the agency would normally spend for a complex mission beyond Earth's orbit.
While legacy NASA contractors usually work under a cost-plus-fixed-fee deal, which means if they have to spend more money, the space agency foots more money, Rocket Lab provided the probes at a fixed price.
"Rocket Lab undertook a task that, to be honest, I'm not going to name names, but at least one of those prime contractors said, 'We're not interested in this because if you need to fit everything into a $57 million cost cap, we can't build you two spacecraft for the price you'd be willing to pay us,'" Rob Lillis, the mission's principal investigator based at UC Berkeley, told Mashable. "Actually, two said that."
The Escapade probes, one dubbed Blue and the other Gold in honor of UC Berkeley's school colors, are each about the size of a stacked washer and dryer. They were recently shipped to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where they will be integrated onto a competitor's rocket, Blue Origin's New Glenn. Rocket Lab's own Electron rocket isn't powerful enough to carry the load. Though the company is developing a multi-ton, medium-lift launch vehicle, to be called Neutron, it won't be ready for another year, Beck said.
"I'm just trying to build rockets."
The UC Berkeley-based science team would not want to wait that long. Not only would they miss the planetary alignment that shortens the travel time, but they might blow their chance to observe how the sun's peak activity affects Mars' atmosphere. Escapade was already sidelined for a couple of years due to changes NASA made to the mission's original rocket. It was once intended to ride along with the agency's Psyche asteroid mission, before NASA altered that probe's trajectory.
The Escapade spacecraft will travel for about 11 months before reaching Mars. Both will adjust their orbits over several months before beginning their primary science mission in April 2026.
When the sun blasts out radiation, charged particles travel along Earth's invisible magnetic field lines, interacting with the atmosphere. When these particles strike gasses, they heat up and glow. The side effects are colorful light displays known as auroras.
For nearly two decades, scientists have known Mars also has auroras, but these lights aren't isolated to the polar regions of the planet as they are on Earth. Rather, Martian auroras can be found in a hodgepodge of places around the planet and come in at least four varieties: localized discreet auroras, global diffuse auroras, proton auroras on the side facing the sun, and a large wormlike aurora stretching to the nightside of the planet. Some of the auroras sprout from the ground, thought to form around what's left of an ancient magnetic field in the planet's crust.
Other orbiters have studied how solar wind interacts with the Martian atmosphere but have been hamstrung: One spacecraft alone can't measure the real-time consequences of solar storms.
"It only takes one or two minutes for one of these space weather disturbances to propagate through the system and, for example, tear out a whole bunch of atmosphere," Lillis said. "Single spacecraft missions cannot separately measure the cause and the effect."
In addition to their instruments, the probes will be equipped with cameras to take the first global snapshots of Martian auroras. The United Arab Emirates' orbiter Hope has obtained images in ultraviolet light, and NASA's Perseverance rover just detected the first aurora from the planet's surface in March following a particularly strong solar flare. But Blue and Gold could be the first to capture overviews of auroras in visible light — likely glowing in shades of ruby and emerald.
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Scientists emphasize this study has practical implications. In order for astronauts to land on Mars and explore one day, they'll need navigation and communication systems that pass signals through the planet's upper atmosphere. The more accurate scientists' models are of Mars' ionosphere, the layer of charged particles surrounding the planet, the better those technologies will work.
For Beck's part, he hopes Rocket Lab's role in the mission will show off the company's engineering prowess for difficult interplanetary assignments and that they can deliver quickly at a competitive price.
"If you can build a spacecraft to go to Mars," he said, "you can build anything you want."
