Two NASA spacecraft from the Adventure program have successfully performed gravity assist maneuvers near Earth and headed toward Mars, where they are expected to arrive in September 2027.
The devices were already launched in November 2025, but instead of a direct flight to Mars, they moved along an elongated orbit near the Earth for almost a year.
The reason is that a favorable planetary position for a flight to Mars occurs about once every 26 months.
The new program allows vehicles to be launched outside this window, and then use Earth's gravity to enter interstellar orbit.
On November 7th and 9th, the devices alternately approached the Earth at a distance of about 1,600 and 1,050 km, and then turned on the engines for about nine minutes.
The combination of gravity maneuvering and additional acceleration made it possible to direct both vehicles to Mars; NASA used such a program for the first time for an interstellar flight to this planet.
Upon arrival, Adventure will enter Mars orbit and begin jointly investigating the interaction of the solar wind with its magnetic environment.
The main goal of the mission is to study the loss mechanisms of the Martian atmosphere, including how streams of charged particles gradually carry it into space.