Some human mission trajectories to Mars include flybys of Venus. These flybys provide opportunities to practice deep space human operations, and offer numerous safe-return-to-Earth options, before committing to longer and lower-cadence Mars-only flights. Venus flybys, as part of dedicated missions to Mars, also enable human-in-the-loop scientific study of the second planet. The time to begin coordinating such Earth-to-Mars-via-Venus missions is now
Categories: astro-ph.IM physics.pop-ph