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The solar system is our home, but we’ve barely looked into most of its rooms.

To be fair, many of those rooms are difficult to get to. Pluto, Eris, Quaoar, and the other small not quite planets beyond Neptune are so far away, we can’t see surface features on them even with our most powerful telescopes. Closer targets still involve a lot of effort, but that doesn’t stop scientists from planning missions, and budget woes can’t stop them from dreaming.

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In the wake of the recent arrival of two new probes orbiting Mars and Philae landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, I took an informal poll of planetary scientists. I asked them to identify some of their personal priorities and what they consider the largest scientific goals for the future. While some of the missions they mentioned would require a lot of money (though they would still be much cheaper than a year of war), they are all workable—and in some cases, the probes have already been designed. Our missions to other worlds, successful as they are, tend to be of a few types or probes. In my conversations with these researchers, they have a lot more ambition and creativity and ambitious plans for future exploration.