NASA scientists have wrapped up a picture-perfect aerobraking mission to Mars by looking toward even more futuristic methods of using a planet’s atmosphere to slow spacecrafts. They closed the book last week on a 75-day effort to ease the 2001 Mars Odyssey into a tighter orbit using a novel process called aerobraking, which means gently dipping the spacecraft into the dense atmosphere to slow it down. They look today to inaugurate missions that take mere aerobraking to new levels and have the potential of taking humans to other planets.