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Future Planetary Exploration: Four Ideas to Bust the Floor on Outer Planet Mission Costs

http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2015/03/four-ideas-to-bust-floor-on-outer.html

Results of Past Polls. Monday, March 23, 2015. Four Ideas to Bust the Floor on Outer Planet Mission Costs. In 1972 and 1973, NASA launched two simple spacecraft, Pioneer 10 and 11, to Jupiter. They were charged with scouting the way for the more sophisticated spacecraft that would follow. Since then, the outer solar system has been the realm of large, expensive missions: the Voyagers, Galileo, and Cassini. To Pluto and the $1.1B Juno mission en route. Enceladus so far is unique in having plumes of water ...

futureplanets.blogspot.com

Future Planetary Exploration: Results of Past Polls

http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/p/results-of-past-polls.html

Results of Past Polls. Results of Past Polls. The following three polls related to the Decadal Survey and closed March 2011. Which Larger Flagship Mission Do You Think the Decadal Survey Should Pick? Uranus Orbiter with probe. Titan Saturn System Mission. Which smaller Flagship mission do you think the Decadal Survey should pick? Which New Frontiers missions do you think the Decadal Survey should prioritize? Trojan Tour and Rendezvous. Lunar Polar Volatiles Explorer. Mars Polar Climate Mission. View my c...

futureplanets.blogspot.com

Future Planetary Exploration: August 2015

http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2015_08_01_archive.html

Results of Past Polls. Monday, August 24, 2015. NASA's Outer Planet Analysis Group is currently meeting to hear the agency's current plans and to provide the feedback of the scientific community on those plans. The second piece of new was that NASA has selected two new planetary CubeSat missions. One will orbit and study the Moon. The other will stay in Earth orbit to be a micro-gravity laboratory to study the interactions of particles that eventually led to the formation of the planets. Imagine that you...

futureplanets.blogspot.com

Future Planetary Exploration: Mission to a Metallic World: A Discovery Proposal to Fly to the Asteroid Psyche

http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2014/02/mission-to-metallic-world-discovery.html

Results of Past Polls. Tuesday, February 18, 2014. Mission to a Metallic World: A Discovery Proposal to Fly to the Asteroid Psyche. Imagine flying deep within the asteroid belt to study the most unreachable location in the solar system: the deep core of a terrestrial world. That will be one asteroid mission that will be proposed for NASA’s upcoming competition to select its next Discovery mission to explore the solar system. When I first began reading about the solar system several decades ago, comets we...

futureplanets.blogspot.com

Future Planetary Exploration: Understanding why our most Earth-like neighbor, Venus, is so different

http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2015/03/understanding-why-our-most-earth-like.html

Results of Past Polls. Saturday, March 7, 2015. Understanding why our most Earth-like neighbor, Venus, is so different. Cover page for the EnVision proposal. The European selection process tends to be more open than the U.S. process, and the EnVision team led by Dr. Richard Ghail at Imperial College London shared a copy of their proposal to ESA with me. While EnVision is out for this current M4 contest, reviewing its proposal can still let us see what type of Venus mapping missions are being proposed&#46...

futureplanets.blogspot.com

Future Planetary Exploration: June 2015

http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2015_06_01_archive.html

Results of Past Polls. Saturday, June 6, 2015. NASA Goes First Class for Europa. There’s an old saying that the clothes make the man. In planetary exploration, the instrument suite makes the mission. Fewer and simpler instruments can enable a lower cost mission but at the cost of restricting the richness of the scientific investigations. Current concept for the Europa Clipper spacecraft. You can read a summary of the mission concept. As we learned last week (see here. Europa is an ocean world that likely...

futureplanets.blogspot.com

Future Planetary Exploration: Update on NASA Mars Rover Plans

http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2015/08/update-on-nasa-mars-rover-plans.html

Results of Past Polls. Tuesday, August 4, 2015. Update on NASA Mars Rover Plans. Corrections: Since original post, I've learned that there currently is no plan to include a descent imager to record the landing as was done for the Curiosity rover. I also accidentally used an image showing the cameras on the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity instead of Curiosity, and this has now been corrected. This mission will carry a new camera to record the landing. the Mars 2020 rover will carry a ca...

futureplanets.blogspot.com

Future Planetary Exploration: PriME/MASPEX and Updates

http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2011/08/primemaspex-and-updates.html

Results of Past Polls. Saturday, August 6, 2011. I'll cover the updates first. Aviation Week and Space Technology (AWST) has had a series of good articles on planetary exploration and space science in the last two issues. (Unfortunately, most require a subscription.) Amy Svitak, formerly with Space News, now writes for AWST, and continues her excellent coverage of policy issues there. First some background on mass spectrometers, which are workhorse instruments in many laboratories and on many spacecraft&...

futureplanets.blogspot.com

Future Planetary Exploration: Correction: No descent camera on the Mars 2020 rover

http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2015/08/correction-no-descent-camera-on-mars.html

Results of Past Polls. Wednesday, August 5, 2015. Correction: No descent camera on the Mars 2020 rover. Since I published my short update on the Mars 2020 plans. I've learned that the current plans for the mission do not include a descent imager. As a result, there currently will not be the equivalent to the descent movie made for the Curiosity landing. I apparently misunderstood a point on an earlier presentation I read. Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom). Reviewing the Discovery Mission Proposals.

futureplanets.blogspot.com

Future Planetary Exploration: April 2015

http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2015_04_01_archive.html

Results of Past Polls. Saturday, April 11, 2015. NASA's Mission to Europa May Get More Interesting Still. Has published an article reporting that NASA officials have asked their European counterparts if they would like to propose contributing a small probe to NASA's Europa mission planned for the mid-2020s. Europa as imaged by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s. Credit: NASA. DeepSpace 2 Mars penetrators. That were never heard from after their release from their mothercraft.). Links to this post.