Flyby maneuvers can be conducted with a
planet, a
natural satellite or a non-planetary object such as a
small Solar System body. Planetary flybys have occurred with
Mars or
Earth: •
List of Earth flybys •
Mars flyby An example of a comet flyby is when
International Cometary Explorer (formerly
ISEE-3) passed about from the
nucleus of
Comet Giacobini-Zinner in September 1985. The
Apollo 13 spacecraft had an exploded oxygen tank, and therefore had to flyby around the Moon. The
Artemis 2 mission included a lunar flyby.
Mars 6U cubesat relay flyby probes and technology demonstrators for the Mars
InSight lander; the flybys provided relay communication support during the landing in 2018 With regard to Mars flybys, a related concept is a Mars flyby rendezvous, where a spacecraft does not enter orbit but rendezvouses before or after a flyby of the planet with another spacecraft. A flyby rendezvous with Mars was evaluated at NASA's
Manned Spacecraft Center in the 1960s. The
Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 flyby of Mars in 1969 resulted in another breakthrough in knowledge about the planet. The Mariner 6 & 7 infrared radiometer results from the flyby showed that the
atmosphere of Mars was composed mostly of
carbon dioxide (CO2), and they were also able to detect trace amounts of
water on the surface of Mars. swung by around Mars at a distance of 250 km and performed a gravity assist. This is the closest flyby of Mars to date. In 2018, the twin
Mars Cube One performed a flyby to relay communication for
InSight lander EDL (they were launched towards Mars with the cruise stage carrying the InSight lander). Both MarCOs reached Mars, and successfully relayed data during the Entry, Descent, and Landing phase of Insight on November 26, 2018. Meanwhile,
Tianwen-1 Deployable Camera, imaged Tianwen-1 during its transit to Mars in September 2020, and made a flyby of Mars around 10 February, 2021 according to its trajectory thought for Mars, before entering deep space or a solar orbit.
Kuiper belt On the night of December 31, 2018 to the morning of January 1, 2019
New Horizons performed the most distant flyby to date of the
Kuiper belt object Arrokoth. New Horizons previously did a flyby of
Pluto in July 2015, and that was at about 32.9 AU (
astronomical units) from the
Sun, while the New Year's Day 2019 flyby of the Kuiper object Arrokoth was at 43.6 AU. '' during its flyby of Pluto
Cassini Cassini-Huygens (launched 1997), which orbited
Saturn (from 2004–2017) performed flybys of many of Saturn's moons including
Titan. It achieved 126 flybys of Titan, and its final close flyby was on April 22, 2017 prior to its retirement.
Comets International Cometary Explorer (
ISEE-3) passed through the plasma tail of comet
Giacobini-Zinner performing a flyby at a distance of from the nucleus on September 11, 1985. In 2010, the
Deep Impact spacecraft on the
EPOXI mission did a flyby of comet Hartley 2. ==Natural flyby==