discovery_sidebar_000828 The 27 proposals submitted to
NASA for its next round of Discovery missions and instruments target a little bit of just about everything there is in the solar system.NASA will winnow the list down to three to five proposals in December. From those finalists, it will then select in August 2001 just one or two of those to pursue, with a likely launch date coming sometime before the fall of 2006.
Costs for full-up missions are capped at $299 million; instrument proposals at $35 million.
Here is a smattering of whats been proposed. About half of the total have been pitched before; the remaining are new:
Moon madness
"This is the year for the
moon," said William Whittaker, director of The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Earth's moon has become a hot destination for many scientists pitching proposals to NASA for Discovery-class missions.
Whittaker is part of a consortium, including NASAs Ames Research Center, Ball and LunaCorp, seeking to send a rover on a four-month exploratory mission to the moons South Pole-Aitken, the largest known impact crater in the
solar system.The "Victoria" rover its name pays homage to the first ship to circumnavigate the globe would search out volatiles, including water ice, in the permanently shaded craters of the lunar south pole and bits of the mantle kicked up during the impact event that created South Pole-Aitken.
"It has been 30 years since we have been on the surface," said Michael Sims, the proposals principal investigator. "This just seems an appropriate time to take our bag of tricks and apply them to the moon."
Among others pitching lunar missions is Michael Duke, of NASAs
Johnson Space Center.Along with Lockheed, Duke proposes probing South Pole-Aitken as well, but this time in a bid to robotically return samples of the region to Earth from the moons far side.
"Things have changed from the moon being a pariah, not viable, and not the right kind of thing to talk about," Whittaker said. "Now its a shootout."
Martian marvels
The lure of
Mars has prompted at least four Discovery proposals, including Pascal, a network of 24 landers that would monitor the atmospheric pressure, temperature and dust levels.The tiny landers, each weighing less than 13 pounds (6 kilograms) would parachute down across the Martian globe, where they would function for anywhere from two to perhaps 20 years. The miniature spacecraft would then relay their data to Earth through their mother craft, which would remain in Mars orbit.
"What we are after is long-term global coverage of the surface of Mars, which would help us learn about its climate," said Robert Haberle, the proposed missions principal investigator.
Other proposals include Kitty Hawk, which would send multiple gliders soaring through Mars Valles Marineris to study the mineralogy of the exposed strata in the valley, the largest such known feature in the solar system. NASA originally hoped to fly one glider on Mars in December 2003 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first powered flight, but scratched the mission.
Piccard would send a balloon-carried magnetometer across the surface of Mars to investigate the sources of the planets strong remnant magnetic anomalies.
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The Mars Atmospheric Oxidant Sensor (MAOS) is a proposed instrument that would travel aboard the Beagle 2 to Mars in 2003. The low-mass and low-power instrument would measure the oxidation potential how quickly things rust on the surface of Mars, said scientist Aaron Zent.
Planet habit
Discovery-program scientist Jay Bergstralh said the search for planets orbiting stars other than our own has become a growth area among Discovery proposals, with several being pitched this round.
Kepler is one of the bunch, a sun-orbiting camera that will stare at 100,000 stars for four years, said principal investigator Bill Borucki.
"It transmits back the brightness of those stars so we can watch when a planet might move across the star," Borucki said.
While an Earth-sized planet would cause an estimated 1-in-10,000 part change to the brightness of star if it crossed, or transited, its disk, Borucki said his mission could detect even as much as a 1-in-100,000 part change.
Other planet-finding proposals will attempt to cancel out, or null, the light of stars to detect the reflected light of orbiting planets, or use gravitational lensing to read starlight for traces of perturbations caused by such planets.
Rock hawks
The solar systems smaller bodies remain a popular target in this round of proposals, as they have in the past with the Discovery program, which has included Shoemaker-NEAR and soon Deep Impact and the Comet Nucleus Tour.
"This just seems an appropriate time to take our bag of tricks and applythem to the moon."
Odyssey would launch in 2006 and, three years later, reach the comet Kopff for a nine-month mission. (While en route, the spacecraft would also fly by Asteroid 24 Themis.)
The mission would allow for an in-depth study of the comet, which had been among the target candidates for the previously cancelled Comet Rendezvous/Asteroid Flyby (CRAF) spacecraft.
The mission science would include multspectral imaging of the comets nucleus, analysis of the gases in its coma and a precise determination of its mass. The spacecraft would return 3.3 feet- (1 meter-) per-pixel resolution images of the comets nucleus an 80-fold improvement over those returned by the spacecraft Giotto of
Halleys Comet in 1986, Paul Weissman, the projects principal investigator, said."You cant get the quality science from flybys that you can from a rendezvous," Weissman said.
Other proposed small-body missions include Sentry, which would study the Main Belt asteroids 4 Vesta and 1 Ceres, and New World Explorer, which would also target 4 Vesta.
By Jove
Our
solar systems largest planet has attracted at least three missions.Among them is the Interior Structure and Internal Dynamical Evolution of Jupiter (INSIDE Jupiter) mission, which would study how planetary systems originate and evolve, as well as how both physical and chemical processes determine the characteristics of the planets.
Another is Jupiter Deep Atmospheric Sounding System and Imager (JASSI), which would measure the abundance of water and ammonia in the planets deep interior. The data would help scientists understand the nature of the solar nebula and planetary formation.
"Were trying to hit on the frontiers of science," said Noel Hinners, vice president of flight systems for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, the JASSI missions proposed industrial partner.
Venus envy
And there are at least three proposals for missions to nearby Venus, last visited by NASA with its 1989 Magellan radar-mapping mission.
Among them are the Venus Environmental Satellite (VESAT) Discovery Mission -- an orbiter that would undertake an investigation of the planets global meteorology, chemistry and volcanism -- and the Venus Sounder for Planetary Exploration (VESPER).
Another is the Venus Atmospheric Measurement Probe, or VAMP, to study how it and the other terrestrial planets acquired their atmospheres, and how they have evolved through time.
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