Principal investigator: Incoming solar flare created ‘perfect storm’ for ESCAPADE
Anticipated solar storms today prompted NASA and Blue Origin to cancel the launch of the agency’s ESCAPADE spacecraft to avoid potential damage and loss of the mission, according to Robert Lillis, the effort’s principal investigator.
“The solar event that is hitting today was going to raise radiation to an unacceptable level. That risk was just too much, the perfect storm,” Lillis said of the decision to postpone.
Today’s 90-minute launch window for the twin spacecraft atop Blue Origin New Glenn rocket was scheduled to open at 2:45 p.m. Eastern. But Lillis knew a fresh solar flare — specifically, a coronal mass ejection — was due to arrive about 20 minutes later and likely last for hours. This was a follow-on to a Tuesday night solar event that resulted in people as far south as Florida seeing the northern lights.
“It was supposed to strike Earth about 10 minutes before we deploy, which would have been a critical time, and we would be vulnerable,” Lillis, a planetary space physicist and geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, told me in a call after the launch was scrubbed. By “deploy,” he was referring to the moment the ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) craft would separate from New Glenn’s second stage and head toward the L1 Lagrange Point, around which they are to travel until late 2026 when the orbits of Earth and Mars are aligned.
Such strong radiation from the solar flare at that point in the mission could have interrupted radio communications with the spacecraft and possibly damaged their circuitry as they were attempting to extend their solar arrays, Lillis said.
Like trying to take a Zoom call while your computer is rebooting, the interruptions could have been fatal to the mission. Some spacecraft have extra solar shielding to survive such a storm, but not the ESCAPADE craft, named Blue and Gold.
“We only have six or seven hours to get them deployed before the battery runs out and we’re dead forever,” Lillis said. “Based on everything we knew, it was just really risky to try to do that.”
He noted that the Tuesday night solar storm had already charged up Earth’s atmosphere with radiation, and such buildups take time to dissipate. On their journey into deep space, Blue and Gold would have passed through the Van Allen belts, two donut-shaped regions around Earth where the planet’s magnetic field traps radioactive particles.
NOAA on Tuesday issued a “storm watch” for today’s solar radiation event, labeled as a G4, or severe. That level is described as potentially causing “widespread voltage control problems” that can impact the power grid. For spacecraft, a G4 has the potential to cause “surface charging and tracking problems” and “corrections may be needed for orientation problems,” according to NOAA’s solar storm scale descriptions.
As of Wednesday afternoon, NASA hadn’t announced a new launch date, but Lillis said the spacecraft are fueled for launch over the next 30 days. “We have already lined up trajectories from basically every day from now and a few weeks into the future,” he said.
Blue and Gold, built by California space company Rocket Lab, are to measure solar radiation as it interacts with the Martian magnetic field. The company said in an email statement that pausing a launch due to solar activity is not unusual, but it has no reference for how often it happens.
“The route that ESCAPADE takes through the Van Allen [radiation] belts exposes it to particularly strong radiation, so monitoring solar activity while the mission is scheduled to travel through this region is important,” said Morgan Connaughton, Rocket Lab’s vice president of marketing and communications. “We monitor solar activity for all missions and it’s not unusual to hold a mission until solar activity levels drop. Current solar activity is particularly energetic though.”
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