Is performing a second burn to circularize a craft's orbit to near-sync with Martian orbit really cheaper than a deceleration burn? In fact, that would just be

Is performing a second burn to circularize a craft's orbit to near-sync with Martian orbit really cheaper than a deceleration burn? In fact, that would just be a complete Hohmann transfer. I'd guess the target orbit for a craft performing this maneuver would still have a periapsis in the neighborhood of Earth's orbit, meaning it'd still be very unlike Mars' orbit until the craft was captured by Martian gravity. (googles a bit) It looks like these exploit Lagrange points somehow[1]. Precision maneuvers and weird, long routes to the target body. I'm not quite following how this works with only two bodies (Sun and Mars), versus the Sun-Earth-Moon trio. Wikipedia claims the Mars Orbiter Mission used a low-energy transfer at some point, but I can't figure out whether that was for the insertion into Martian orbit or some earlier maneuver it performed. [1] http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~mwl/publications/papers/lowEnergy.pdf http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~mwl/publications/papers/lowEnergy... [edit] Hoffman -> Hohmann, because I'm an idiot.