hey icehawk -- so you can use any celestial object in the solar system to maneuver; all you're doing is basically changing your direction. But you're right, there's something strange going on here. The original article doesn't actually have any information about what this spacecraft is doing, but it links to another one about the speed. I'm looking at that now, gonna add an addendum (or edit the old comment if i can figure out how to do that)