The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are taking big steps into space exploration in the coming years, eyeing Venus and numerous asteroids as future studies.
NASA has already made the impossible possible when New Horizons probe had its first flyby of Pluto, the once ninth planet of the solar system. Just this week, NASA again was making headlines by announcing the discovery of water in Mars.
Now, the famous space administration is aiming for mission or missions on Venus and asteroid with the planetary system.
Five science investigations that were proposed by different teams to NASA's new plans for space exploration has been chosen for refinement in the next year. One or two of the chosen fiver are planned to be launched in 2020.
Three of five investigations are tied to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. NASA aims to launch low costs missions with this project.
NASA gave the five teams an amount of $3 million to conduct concept design studies and analyses of their proposed investigations. NASA will review and evaluate the studies and will reveal their choices for the mission by September 2016.
One or two selected missions will have a budget of $500 million, which does not include the launch vehicle funding and post-launch operations.
The five chosen science investigations are the following:
Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS): It aims to return high-topographic data and photos of the entire surface Venus.
Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI): aims to understand Venus' atmosphere as well as the possibility of the planet having volcanoes.
Psyche: a probe that will study metallic asteroid Psyche.
Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam): a mission to discover ten times more near-Earth objects than there ever was.
Lucy: has a mission to study the Trojan asteroids the circle the sun.
