I'm finding the professor gig is keeping me pretty busy, and posts here have become scarce.  I still do expect to post irregularly here.  You can find many posts of future planetary missions at the NASASpaceflight.com site, where I post fairly regularly.  Two recommended forums: Space science coverage  Mars missions ..read more

NASA recently posted its draft Announcement of Opportunity for its next Discovery competition that will select two missions, one to fly in the mid-2020s and the other in the late 2020s.  I am starting to see in scientific conferences missions likely to be proposed (several of which were also proposed but not selected for the last competition that selected the Lucy and Psyche asteroid missions).  NASA expects to select up to five finalists for further definition with the final selections from this candidate list. Mission proposals can target any solar system study, except those that ..read more

The two concepts contending to be selected as NASA’s next planetary mission have two things in common. Both would do compelling science. Both would not begin their scientific missions until the mid-2030s. Otherwise the two missions could not be more different. The Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (CAESAR) mission would return to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko that the Rosetta spacecraft and its lander Philae previously studied.  The CAESAR spacecraft essentially would be a high-tech truck that would grab a small sample from the surface and then return it to Earth.&nb ..read more

When I wrote my blog post on the New Frontiers mission proposals, I could identify eleven of the twelve proposals.  One, though, then had no public trace.  Shortly after my piece was published, several people emailed me to tell me that the twelfth proposal was a third Venus mission called the Venus Origins eXplorer (VOX).  However, they offered no details on its implementation. Now the team proposing the mission will present its implementation at an upcoming scientific conference.  Their abstract for the talk reveals key facts about the proposal, and it’s a gutsy break w ..read more

The last two weeks have seen a number of articles and press releases on future planetary exploration.  The big news was that NASA’s managers are proposing a fast track Mars sample return mission for the mid-2020s.  Numerous articles were written; I’ve listed several that I thought were among the best I saw. You might also want to check out Leonard David’s story, Beating Curiosity, on the technical enhancements that will enable the Mars 2020 rover mission. For fans of Titan exploration, there’s now a website for the proposed Dragonfly rotocraft and an article on the proposed Ocean ..read more

Press Releases Mars 2020 mission to use smart methods to seek signs of past life NASA studies CubeSat mission to solve Venusian mystery NASA Studies Tethered CubeSat Mission to Study Lunar Swirls Space.com Mars Sample Return: Scientists Debate How to Bring Red Planet Rocks to Earth By Leonard David Science Missions to probe exoplanets, galaxies, and cosmic inflation vie for $250 million NASA slot By Daniel Clery Aug. 16, 2017 The Space Review CubeSats: faster and cheaper, but are they better? By Jeff Foust   Space News Beyond HAL: How artificial intelligence is changing space systems b ..read more

NASA’s managers are in the processing selecting the agency's next planetary mission from a field of twelve competitors.  This fourth mission in the New Frontiers program will follow in the footsteps of the three missions in this program that have already launched: The New Horizons Pluto spacecraft, the Juno Jupiter orbiter, and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission.   By law, NASA’s managers cannot reveal information on the proposals submitted to protect the proprietary ideas of the proposing teams.  However, the proposing teams often will disclose some informat ..read more

  The Senate Makes Its Move: Nearly $200M less for NASA in 2018 Casey Dreier• July 28, 2017 The proposed $19.5 billion would be less than the agency received in 2017, and substantially less than that proposed by the House for the coming year. China’s quest to become a space science superpower With major spaceflight milestones behind it, China is working to build an international reputation for space science. Daniel Marín publishes in Spanish, but Google Translate (and presumably other translators) do a good job of translating into English.   Destin ..read more

When I started this blog almost a decade ago, there wasn't another site that regularly focused on future planetary exploration.  That has since changed, especially with regular postings by Jason Davis at the Planetary Society.  At the same time, since I have become a professor, my time is more constrained. With these changes, I plan to make changes to this blog.  First, I will do a weekly posting with links to good articles and blog posts on issues relevant to future planetary exploration.  I intend for this to be similar to the excellent Ed's Up weekly collection of excel ..read more

One fact dominates the planning for any mission to Uranus or Neptune.  They lie far from the sun.  Reaching one of these worlds takes so long that by the standards of almost any other mission, the spacecraft is already old before it would begin its observations of its target world.  The Juno spacecraft took five years to reach Jupiter and the Cassini spacecraft took almost seven to reach Saturn.  A mission to orbit Uranus, by contrast, could take twelve years just to reach its destination, with a launch in May 2031 and arriving at Uranus in May 2043.  As a resul ..read more