NEW YORK, November 10. . The launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket and the pair of ESCAPADE probes developed by American planetary scientists to study the properties of Mars' magnetic crust was canceled due to unfavorable weather conditions.
The launch is expected to take place from the spaceport in Cape Canaveral (Florida). A post on Blue Origin's X page said: “Today's NG-2 launch was canceled due to weather conditions, specifically cloud cover.” “We are exploring options for the next launch based on the weather forecast.”
The ESCAPADE project is part of NASA's SIMPLEx program, in which the US space agency supports the development and launch of small, low-cost planetary science missions. Since the program launched in 2015, program participants have built five spacecraft, one of which the Janus asteroid mission was delayed indefinitely and three others ended in failure.
Researchers hope that the dual mission ESCAPADE, the most ambitious project of the SIMPLEx program, will be the first successful implementation. As part of this initiative, scientists from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as their partners from other scientific institutions in the United States, have prepared two small satellites equipped with magnetometers, cameras, plasma detectors, electrostatic analyzers and other necessary equipment to study the Martian magnetosphere.
