system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How can NASA get in orbit around other planets?

I have been playing KSP for a while and this came up recently:
How does the NASA get into orbit around mars or jupiter (for example)? To save fuel i imagine they aerocapture, but is it common? Also, is there a limit on how much stress we can put the spacecraft in the atmosphere?
gpt
They use rocket motors, not aerocapture. Once the spacecraft gets in position near a planet, they orient the engine to point more or less opposite the direction of motion. Then they do an orbital insertion burn to get down to orbital velocity. Usually this leaves the craft in a highly elliptical orbit, so they keep doing burns at the apsids until they get the orbit they want.

This is part of why they're not going to orbit Pluto, getting out there in a reasonable time is going to take a lot of fuel and a couple of gravity assists. It will be going very fast when it gets there, which would require a lot of fuel to burn off. The other part of the reason is because they want to go to the Kuiper Belt.