{"id":204703,"date":"2026-03-05T00:23:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T00:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/204703\/"},"modified":"2026-03-05T00:23:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T00:23:06","slug":"berkeleys-blue-and-gold-satellites-are-now-flying-through-earths-magnetotail-a-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/204703\/","title":{"rendered":"Berkeley\u2019s Blue and Gold satellites are now flying through Earth’s magnetotail \u2014 a first"},"content":{"rendered":"

With their instruments now fired up and recording data, the twin ESCAPADE satellites<\/a> are undertaking a test run before they head to Mars later this year. On Wednesday, Mar. 4, they will plow through a never-explored area around Earth: its distant magnetotail.<\/p>\n

The 10-day excursion through our long magnetic wake, created as the solar wind sweeps past Earth, could yield new information about how distant magnetic fields affect space weather around our planet and the colorful auroras known as the Northern and Southern lights.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a great opportunity for us to test the operation of the ESCAPADE instruments and explore a brand-new region of space \u2014 and hopefully make some discoveries,\u201d said Rob Lillis, principal investigator for the mission and a researcher at UC Berkeley\u2019s Space Sciences Laboratory. \u201cWe will be looking for what\u2019s known as magnetic reconnection, when essentially oppositely directed magnetic fields combine and snap back, accelerating plasma in the direction of the earth, which is one of the processes that contributes to the aurora.\u201d<\/p>\n

UC Berkeley\u2019s Rob Lillis of the Space Sciences Laboratory explains what ESCAPADE\u2019s Blue and Gold satellites can learn by flying through a never-explored area around Earth \u2014 its magnetotail, stretching a million miles leeward of Earth in the blast of the solar wind. (Video credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio and Alan Toth\/SSL)<\/p>\n

Launched on Nov. 13, 2025, NASA\u2019s ESCAPADE mission<\/a> (short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) is destined for Mars to investigate the solar wind\u2019s impact on that planet. One key question is how the solar wind \u2014 fast particles ejected by the sun during intense magnetic activity \u2014 interacts with Mars\u2019 magnetic environment and how this interaction drives the planet\u2019s atmospheric escape.<\/p>\n

But before heading to Mars, the satellites are taking one of two swings around Earth, the perfect opportunity to sample the part of our planet\u2019s magnetic field that extends away from the sun more than a million miles (about 2 million kilometers). The two ESCAPADE spacecraft \u2014 Blue and Gold \u2014 are the first to travel through this distant part of the magnetotail.<\/p>\n

In this video, Lillis explains the magnetotail fly-through using a visualization created by NASA\u2019s Scientific Visualization Studio. The visualization uses a detailed simulation (by\u00a0 scientists at Kyoto University) based on data collected by other spacecraft in the inner part of Earth\u2019s magnetotail, but since there are no measurements from the region ESCAPADE will fly through, the distant part of the magnetotail that ESCAPADE will traverse does not appear in the visualization.<\/p>\n

After their encounter with the magnetotail, the ESCAPADE satellites will leave Earth, then swing one last time around our planet, in early November, before leaving forever on their trajectory toward Mars. They will arrive in Fall 2027.<\/p>\n

RELATED INFORMATION<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With their instruments now fired up and recording data, the twin ESCAPADE satellites are undertaking a test run…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[94711,143,145,144],"class_list":["post-204703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-astronomy-and-space-sciences","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}