NASA Future Planetary Missions

NASA Announces Five Investigations For Future Missions

Just about when things seemed to get quiet on the space exploration front, NASA announced five new studies that could result in one or perhaps two new missions for planetary studies.  If all goes well, these could even happen as early as 2020.

DAVINCI would look at the composition of Venus’ atmosphere.

VERITAS would perform high resolution topotography, imaging and basically mapping of the entire planet’s surface.

Psyche would try to determine the making of planet cores by studying the metallic asteroid Psyche.

NEOCam would greatly increase our ability to detect near-Earth objects (so we might hopefully be able to do something about the nasty ones).

LUCY would go take a look at the Jupiter Trojan asteroids to see if we can learn more about how our solar system came to be.

All of these are worthy of study and quite exciting to consider as possible missions.

The article below agrees and is well worth the read

NASA Funds Five New Missions: To Venus, Psyche, and Beyond

On Wednesday, NASA announced a shortlist of candidate missions for its Discovery Program, which focuses on low-cost but high-yield space exploration projects. The five concepts that made the cut include a mission to the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, a trip to the Jupiter Trojan asteroid system, two ideas for further Venus exploration, and a badass asteroid-hunting camera.

“The selected investigations have the potential to reveal much about the formation of our solar system and its dynamic processes,” said astronaut and NASA associate administrator John Grunsfeld in a statement. “Dynamic and exciting missions like these hold promise to unravel the mysteries of our solar system and inspire future generations of explorers. It’s an incredible time for science, and NASA is leading the way.”

The two Venus missions in particular display an ingenious flare for acronyms, and are dubbed the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) and the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission (VERITAS) …..

 

Volcanic activity like this. Image: Pixabay

 

…… The five concepts have been granted $3 million dollars each to begin testing out their designs, and the ones that are greenlit as full-fledged missions will be given a cost cap of $500 million to work within. We’ll have to wait to fall of 2016 before we find out which concepts make the next cut, but we’re hoping that NEOCam is on that list. Venus, Psyche, and the Jupiter trojans are cool, but let’s avoid getting wiped out by some random asteroid impact so that we can study them further.

To read the full article, please see motherboard.com