The decision was made to avoid significant cost, schedule, and technical challenges associated with potentially removing fuel from the spacecraft in the event of a launch delay, which could be caused by a number of factors.

The spacecraft bus is originally adapted from the Rocket Lab Photon upper stage and is approximately 60 × 70 × 90 cm (24 × 28 × 35 in).

A 200 cm (79 in) boom extends above the spacecraft, hosting the EMAG and ELP mNLP sensors.

EESA is an electrostatic analyzer designed to measure the energies, fluxes, and masses of suprathermal ions from 2 eV to 20 keV and energies and fluxes of suprathermal electrons from 3 eV to 10 keV.

ELP is a Langmuir probe consisting of three separate sensors: the multi-needle Langmuir probe (mNLP) consists of 4 thin needles mounted in two pairs ~3/4 way up the boom and measures thermal electron density; the two planar ion probes (PIPs) are mounted on the instrument deck and measure thermal ion density, and the floating potential probe (FPP) is also mounted on the spacecraft deck and measures changes in relative spacecraft electrostatic potential.

Once the nominal science orbit is achieved, approximately six months after arriving at Mars, Science Campaign A involves both spacecraft flying in the same orbit at varying distances from one another, ~170 × 8,400 km (110 × 5,220 mi) (5.66 hours) with an inclination of 65 degrees.

This campaign will operate for approximately five months until the end of the nominal science mission less than three years after launch.