The space agency’s focus recently switched from distant moons and exoplanets to Venus and asteroids.
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The Near Earth Object Camera, a previously proposed mission to catalog asteroids, comets and other bodies that will pass close by Earth.
Each investigation team will receive $3 million to conduct concept design studies and analyses. The space association arrangements to step in picking one of two of the missions one year from now for flight open doors as ahead of schedule as 2020.
Bottom line: On September 30, 2015, NASA announced five investigations for further study.
Jim Green, director of NASA’s planetary science division. “It would also begin to characterize them”. “They have to demonstrate their ability to stay within the cost cap”. And that doesn’t even include the launch vehicle or post-launch operations.
“If we pick two out of the five, that’s a good percentage”, Green said.
PSI has a long history of participating in Discovery class missions.
The one finalist to forgo the use of government-furnished equipment is the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission, which would descend into the Venusian atmosphere to study its interaction with the planet’s surface.
Carrying a X-band radar, the VERITAS orbiter manufactured by Lockheed Martin would circle Venus in a polar orbit, surveying the planet’s topography with “order of magnitude improvements in altimetry and imaging” over NASA’s Magellan radar mapper sent to Venus in 1989, said Suzanne Smrekar, the VERITAS principal investigator from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Determining whether or not this is the case, and whether or not volcanic activity plays an active role in the composition of Venus’s thick atmosphere, will be central to DAVINCI’s mission.
Objective: “Explore the origin of planetary cores by studying the metallic asteroid Psyche”. These asteroids share the same orbit as Jupiter around the sun but are situated in front of and behind Jupiter. Linda Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona is the principal investigator. “Nobody has ever seen a metal world before”.
The third asteroid mission would be an extensive asteroid-cataloguing effort.
The mission would discover about 10 times more near-Earth objects than have been found to date, NASA officials said.
Little is known about these asteroids, which could have come from further out in the solar system. Sykes is on the NEOCam project team.
Artist’s concept of the NEOCam spacecraft.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”, said Harold Levison, Lucy’s chief scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. This object is one of the ten most-massive asteroids in the main asteroid belt.
If approved, Lucy would be manufactured by Lockheed Martin and managed at NASA-Goddard.
The next New Frontiers mission is capped at $850 million, excluding launch, according to slides Green presented here. The program has funded and developed 12 missions to date, including MESSENGER, Dawn, Stardust, Deep Impact, Genesis and GRAIL, and is now completing development of InSight. The second, the Juno Jupiter probe, launched in 2011.
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Some, but not all, of these Homesteader technologies could be used for multiple high-priority missions identified for the fourth New Frontiers competition in the 2011 planetary science decadal survey, which set science priorities for NASA’s robotic exploration program through 2022.
