Energy-saving capture at Mars via backward stable orbits

The orbit capture, which transfers the spacecraft from the interplanetary trajectory to the target orbit about a celestial body, is a key event in an exploration mission. A low-energy capture strategy, termed ballistic capture, has been developed and applied to lunar transfer, such as Hiten [1] and GRAIL [2]. Such capture exploits the gravitational force of the multi-body system to change the orbit energy of the spacecraft with respect to the target planet from positive to negative.