The VERITAS mission would map the surface of Venus (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA is eyeing asteroids and Venus for its next low-cost space venture, due to launch around 2020. The agency has chosen five potential missions for its Discovery programme, and handed out $3 million to each of the teams behind them to develop the concepts further.

Two proposed missions aim to send a spacecraft to study Venus, where we currently have no active probes. DAVINCI would dive into the planet’s dense, toxic atmosphere to study its chemical composition and look for any active volcanoes on the surface, while VERITAS would map the surface in high resolution. This is no easy feat – the planet has surface temperatures above 450 °C.


Comet Psyche is mostly heavy metal (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The others have asteroids in their sights. Psyche would visit a large asteroid, also called Psyche, that appears to be mostly made from iron and nickel rather than rock, just like Earth’s core. Planetary scientists suspect Psyche is the shrapnel left over from a small rocky world that collided with another, stripping off all but the core. Another spacecraft, Lucy, would visit the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter, space rocks that orbit either side of the gas giant.

NEOCam would spot asteroids (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

A final mission, a space telescope called NEOCam, would be stationed near Earth and watch asteroids from afar. The mission aims to detect and classify a million asteroids over its four year lifetime, including ones that could potentially impact Earth. NASA recently cut ties with the B612 Foundation, a private initiative to build a similar space telescope, after it missed deadlines and failed to raise the necessary funds.

Next September NASA will choose one or two of these missions to receive full funding of $500 million and gear up for a launch in around five years’ time. Previous missions in the Discovery programme include Dawn, currently in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, and Kepler, the space telescope that has discovered over 1000 exoplanets.

“The selected investigations have the potential to reveal much about the formation of our solar system and its dynamic processes,” said John Grunsfeld, science administrator at NASA . “Dynamic and exciting missions like these hold promise to unravel the mysteries of our solar system and inspire future generations of explorers.”