A team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, North Carolina State University and NASA, has proposed, via whitepaper, that NASA should direct its Mars-bound spacecraft to fly by Venus first. In their paper, uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, the researchers outline their arguments for an opposition mission, as opposed to a conjunction mission.
![](https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/tmb/2019/venus.jpg)
Source:
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-case-slingshotting-venus-mars.html