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NASA Funds Five New Missions: To Venus, Psyche, and Beyond

Oh yeah, and a camera that might save the world from deadly asteroid impacts.
We’re coming for you, Venus. Image: Brocken Inaglory

On Wednesday, NASA announced a shortlist of candidate missions for its Discovery Program, which focuses on low-cost but high-yield space exploration projects. The five concepts that made the cut include a mission to the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, a trip to the Jupiter trojan asteroid system, two ideas for further Venus exploration, and a badass asteroid-hunting camera.

"The selected investigations have the potential to reveal much about the formation of our solar system and its dynamic processes," said astronaut and NASA associate administrator John Grunsfeld in a statement. "Dynamic and exciting missions like these hold promise to unravel the mysteries of our solar system and inspire future generations of explorers. It's an incredible time for science, and NASA is leading the way."

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The two Venus missions in particular display an ingenious flare for acronyms, and are dubbed the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) and the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission (VERITAS).

DAVINCI proposes sending a craft on a 63-minute hellride through Venus's atmosphere, collecting data about the planet's atmosphere, volcanic activity, and surface pressures during the descent.

Volcanic activity like this. Image: Pixabay

VERITAS, in contrast, is an orbiter mission concept dedicated to mapping, imaging, and interpreting Venus's surface from the safety of space. Either way, there has been a lag in Venusian exploration over the last decade, so it would be great to make another trip to this beautiful nightmare world.

Psyche, meanwhile, has never been visited by a spacecraft, but it's an interesting place. For one thing, it's one of the biggest objects in the asteroid belt, with a diameter of 253 kilometers. Pysche was also likely once a protoplanet before some errant space rock slammed into the asteroid and rocked off its outer crust, leaving it as just a weird, exposed, metallic core floating around in space. Sold.

Then there's the trip to the Jupiter trojan asteroids, inexplicably dubbed "Lucy," which aims to take a closer look at the odd band of space debris that shares Jupiter's orbit around the Sun. These objects are thought to have trailed the gas giants as they migrated towards the Sun in the early solar system, and so far, roughly 6,000 of them have been discovered. As such, the Jupiter trojans are unexplored time capsules from the solar system's earliest days.

Finally, the Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) mission humbly suggests thoroughly documenting the scores of dangerous objects whizzing around Earth, and cataloguing them to see which pose the most immediate threats to life as we know it. According to NASA, NEOCam will be able to root out ten times as many NEOs than all the objects found to date. Given how lackluster NASA's NEO projects have been so far, it would be great to have this kind of prolific platform for studying our solar system's stray bullets.

The five concepts have been granted $3 million dollars each to begin testing out their designs, and the ones that are greenlit as full-fledged missions will be given a cost cap of $500 million to work within. We'll have to wait to fall of 2016 before we find out which concepts make the next cut, but we're hoping that NEOCam is on that list. Venus, Psyche, and the Jupiter trojans are cool, but let's avoid getting wiped out by some random asteroid impact so that we can study them further.