NASA's twin Escapade spacecraft have finally launched.

This week on Planetary Radio.

I'm Sarah al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. After weather delays, a government shut down, and even a powerful solar storm,

NASA's Escapade mission finally began its journey to Mars on November 13, 2025.

The twin spacecraft will study how the solar wind interacts with the Martian atmosphere and its patchy

magnetic fields. That's key to understanding how Mars lost so much of its atmosphere over time.

Today, we're celebrating this achievement with two conversations. First, we're joined by Ari Coppell,

AAAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow and Space Policy Intern at the Planetary Society.

He was at Cape Canaveral for the pre-launch events.

He'll share what it was like to navigate multiple scrubs and a solar storm delay

to watch the second-ever Blue Origin New Glen rocket launch

and feel that deeply personal experience of watching a spacecraft carrying an

instrument he worked on begin its journey to another world. Then we'll learn more from Rob Lillis,

Escapade, principal investigator, and associate director for planetary science at UC Berkeley's

Space Science Laboratory. He'll walk us through the mission's science goals, its unusual trajectory,

and how two small spacecraft working together can map the dynamic interactions between Mars's

very strange magnetic fields and the solar wind. And later in What's Up, Bruce Betz, the chief

scientist at the Planetary Society, joins me to talk about why Mars still produces Aurora, even though it doesn't have a global magnetic dynamo.

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Escapade is short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers.

It's a pair of identical spacecraft built to study how the solar wind interacts with Mars's patchy magnetic fields,

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