Binary satellite system to approach low orbit After hearing the exciting news about discovery of a new earth like planet, It is becoming more of an urgent need to come up with more efficient ways of sending probes to investigate new planets.  
One idea is to deploy a command module in the orbit of the planet and dangle the probe by a very thin light-weight cable a few hundred kilometers long. Or have the prob and command module rotating around their CG which stays in the orbit.
By saving on the fuel needed to send the prob to surface and later retrieve it they can add to the payload or travel farther.
The length of the cable could be designed to let probe almost land and stay stationary on the surface for a few seconds to do sampling and data gathering.
In effect the probe path would be like the path of the air-valve on a bicycle tire while the bicycle is ridden.
Is this practical? 
 A: For a planet like Mars or our moon, it is practical if sufficient weight can be put into orbit. For a planet with as much gravity and atmosphere as ours, there are engineering problems with the cable.
This is called a rotating skyhook.
Typically it could be used in two ways. The first is to pick things up from the surface (or above the surface) and fling them into a higher orbit than the satellite. This exacts a momentum penalty on the satellite that needs to be made up. The second is to capture something and lower it to the surface, and that results in a momentum gain, so it could offset the first.
A: No.
First off, any interstellar mission for the foreseeable future is going to be a one-way trip. All the speed a spacecraft picked up it would have to cancel out to decelerate into orbit around a planet, and unfortunately this is just not feasible. Your probe is going to be going a considerable fraction the speed of light and there's just no way to stop it. You get a single high-speed flyby and that's it.
Assuming you can even slow down, you have the problem of the cable. In order for it to hold up its own weight, not to mention the weight of a probe, it's going to have to be heavy. Even the most optimistic projections for a space elevator using carbon nanotubes show that the cable is going to be many thousands of tons and at least a few meters thick. Now you're facing the issue of having a heavy cable whipping through the atmosphere at orbital speeds - it'll just burn up.
For the weight and impossible complexity of a cable, you could just as well carry engines and fuel for the probe, and this is assuming you have the almost godlike ability to slow down into orbit.
