NASA To Announce Finalists For Space Mission Today: Who Are The Contenders?

NASA is set to announce the finalists for their future unmanned mission as part of the New Frontiers program set to launch in mid-2020’s to explore areas of the solar system of high-interest to us on Dec. 20 at a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EST.

There are many questions about NASA’s next big mission. Where will the spacecraft go? What will it study?

After NASA launched the New Frontiers program, these have become commonplace questions for all of the space nuts. These series of space exploration missions being conducted by NASA aims at researching several of the Solar System bodies, including the dwarf planet Pluto.

NASA had announced that a new spacecraft will join the current fleet of New Frontiers missions including New Horizons to Pluto and beyond, into the Kuiper Belt, NASA sent Juno to study Jupiter. The OSIRIS-REx is an asteroid sample return mission conducted by NASA that helps us study space rock up-close. It is currently en route to surveying 101955 Bennu, an asteroid which will arrive in 2018.

Current New Frontiers missions are New Horizons to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, Juno at Jupiter, and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, now heading to the asteroid Bennu for arrival in 2018.

The space agency announced three finalists for the last New Frontier program. Each selected team will get $4 million in this year’s event and NASA will decide in 2019 which mission to actually build and launch by the end of 2025.

According to a NASA release, the conference to announce the nominees will be attended by Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington; Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington;Curt Niebur, New Frontiers program scientist at at NASA Headquarters and the contestants themselves.

There were a total of 12 proposals that NASA released in May. The consists of various targets and study subjects for the next New Frontier mission. They include some of our prime targets in our exploration of the solar system as identified by the planetary science community and NASA scientists.

The proposals include probable future missions called Comet Surface Sample Return, Lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin Sample Return, Ocean Worlds (Titan and/or Enceladus), Saturn Probe, Trojan Tour and Rendezvous and Venus In Situ Explorer.

Each of the above proposals focuses on a different area of study. The Venus in Situ exploratory mission focuses on studying Venus, a planet we seem to have forgotten in our race for Mars. The proposal is led by Larry W. Esposito of the University of Colorado. They want to put a lander on Venus, drilling into the rocks and taking pictures to give us a more in-depth idea of our neighbor.

Another area of study that scientists are gearing up for is The South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon at its South Pole. The basin is 1,600 miles wide and eight miles deep and is the scar of a cataclysmic impact more than 4 billion years ago. Scientists feel that this depth could give us access to the Moon’s mantle giving us major clues on its evolution.

The Comet Nucleus Dust and Organics Return, or Condor, proposed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, would return to Comet 67P, scoop up samples and bring them to Earth for closer study, said the official proposal document.

The teleconference will be streamed live on NASA’s website and you can watch them reveal the finalists for the next mission. Each team will receive a prize to help them give their idea structure and gear up towards the 2019 announcement of the winning mission to be launched by end of 2025 (tentative).