An artist's depiction of the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft at Mars. (Image credit: James Rattray/Rocket Lab USA)

Twin NASA spacecraft are wrapping up a year-long escapade, ready to make a beeline to the Red Planet.

The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) spacecraft launched in November 2025 on the second-ever flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. But rather than head straight to Mars, the two spacecraft dawdled through a looping trajectory . Now, they are back in Earth's neighborhood where they tackled a crucial engine burn unusually close to Earth that — if all goes well — will set them on track for Mars .

"No NASA mission has ever done this before," said Rob Lillis, a planetary and space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and principal investigator of the ESCAPADE mission.…