UC Berkeley's twin Mars probes swing past Earth this weekend; telescope owners may catch them late Friday and Sunday nights

Two refrigerator-size NASA spacecraft managed by UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory will skim past Earth this weekend and fire their engines to head for Mars, a maneuver no Mars-bound spacecraft has completed.  Bay Area stargazers with a telescope may be able to spot them the night before each pass.

What happens

The mission, ESCAPADE, is short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers.  The first spacecraft passes closest to Earth around 2 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 7, Pacific time, and the second around 3 a.m. Monday, Nov. 9.  Each will be 600 to 1,100 miles up, higher than most satellites, and will fire its engine for about 9 minutes at its closest point.  Earth's gravity plus the burn raises its speed from about 6.3 to 6.7 miles per second, fast enough to cross the country in under 7 minutes.  The engineering term is a powered flyby, or Oberth maneuver.

The twins launched Nov. 13, 2025, on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., when Earth and Mars were on opposite sides of the sun.  The planets line up for an easy trip only every 26 months, so instead of waiting on the ground the spacecraft spent a year looping around a point in space about a million miles beyond Earth.  On the way they flew through a stretch of Earth's magnetic "tail," pushed out by the solar wind, that no spacecraft had sampled directly; the team says findings are coming soon.

Why Mars

Mars once had a thick atmosphere and liquid water.  The solar wind, a million-mile-per-hour stream of particles from the sun, has stripped much of that air away.  After a 10-month cruise, arriving Sept. 7 and 9, 2027, the pair will be the first science mission to coordinate two orbiters around Mars, measuring cause and effect at once.  "It gives us what you might call a stereo perspective," said Rob Lillis, the mission's principal investigator at UC Berkeley.  Rocket Lab built the spacecraft.

Can you see them?

Probably only with a telescope, and it takes some work.  NASA's star charts for Berkeley, close to what San Jose sees, show the first spacecraft visible from about 7 p.m. Friday until about 1 a.m. Saturday, brightest between midnight and 1 a.m., then rising again around 3 a.m. until dawn washes it out after 5.  The second is visible from about 7 p.m. Sunday to about 2 a.m. Monday, brightest from 1 to 2 a.m.  Each looks like a faint dot creeping against the stars, taking hours to cross the sky.  NASA has not published how bright they will be.  Exact positions for San Jose are available from NASA JPL's Horizons system.

Conditions help.  The moon is new at 11:02 p.m. Sunday, so neither night has moonlight.  The National Weather Service forecast for San Jose calls for a mostly clear Friday night, low around 48; Sunday night is beyond the current forecast.  For anyone with a computerized telescope it's a rare chance to watch a Mars mission leave; without one, there's nothing to see.

Source:  NASA ESCAPADE mission blog, "NASA's Twin ESCAPADE Spacecraft to Slingshot Past Earth on Way to Mars" (Nov. 2, 2026); NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, "Star Charts for ESCAPADE's Earth Flyby" (Nov. 2, 2026); NASA ESCAPADE mission page; NASA, "NASA's ESCAPADE Ready to Study Space Weather from Earth to Mars"; U.S. Naval Observatory moon phases; National Weather Service forecast for San Jose (issued Nov. 5, 2026).  Drafted by AI for San Jose using NASA source material.  NASA did not write or review this story.