NASA short-lists six candidates for future missions – The Register

NASA has published a shortlist of six missions its considering for launch from the year 2022.

All are part of the space agency's Explorers Program, which aims to do heliophysics and astrophysics on modest budgets. The program runs Medium-Class missions with a budget cap of US$250m and Missions of Opportunity that get just $70m to play with. Over 90 Explorer missions have run since the first in 1958.

The Medium-Class missions NASA's decided to fling some exploratory cash at are:

The Missions of Opportunity bidding for a green light are:

NASA's already conditionally-selected a mission called CASE, or Contribution to ARIEL Spectroscopy of Exoplanets. CASE would provide packaged detectors to the ESA's planned Atmospheric Remote-sensing Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL). Doing so would help that effort's attempts to understand the early stages of planetary and atmospheric formation during the nebular phase and the following few millions of years.

Making this shortlist means the projects mentioned above have scored funding for a nine-month implementation concept study. More reviews await each project after that document is completed and assessed, but NASA is hopeful it will launch one of the missions above by the year 2022.

Sponsored: The Joy and Pain of Buying IT - Have Your Say

Continued here:

NASA short-lists six candidates for future missions - The Register

Related Posts

Comments are closed.