China’s lunar missions have shown that its engineers have the discipline and ability to undertake an ambitious program. If China’s leaders desire, they could fund this program (as I said above, on a national scale planetary missions are affordable). I suspect, though, that this represents the priority list of Chinese scientists, much like the Decadal Survey represents the priority list of US scientists. If the willingness of Chinese politicians to fund planetary missions is similar to that of US politicians, perhaps a third or a half of these missions will see serious development by 2030. Even that fraction, though, would make China a leading player in planetary exploration.

On this list, I’d most like to see the Ceres sample return. We already know that this asteroid is an rock-ice world different than any we've explored to date. I suspect that the Dawn spacecraft will show how intriguing this world is when it arrives in 2015. China’s lunar sample missions will fill a big hole that no other nation currently is addressing. China could fill a similar hole for Ceres, while all the other missions on the list are similar to those already planned by other space agencies (although at each world, there are always opportunities to explore from a new angle).

The next idea jumps from looking at missions across the solar system to enabling micro missions at Mars. NASA is planning a Martian rover mission for 2020 that will duplicate the entry system of the Curiosity rover mission currently on Mars. That entry system has disposable weights that are ejected during the entry and landing process. NASA has issued a challenge to the planetary science and engineering communities to suggest ideas how these could go from dead weights to useful micro-missions. NASA’s call for proposals states, “Proposed concepts should indicate uses for ejectable mass up to 150 kg prior to Mars atmospheric entry and/or another 150 kg during the entry and landing phases of the mission. NASA is seeking concepts that expand scientific knowledge or technological capabilities while exhibiting a high degree of practicality.”

A 150 kg is a lot to work with (although volumes will be constrained). I’m really intrigued to learn what creative ideas will be put forth. NASA expects to announce the winner this January.

The Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine reports that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerospace Corporation are exploring a different concept, called MARSdrop, for piggy-back Mars spacecraft. The idea is take advantage of the wealth of spacecraft systems that have been developed for CubeSats that use tiny form factors (as small as 10x10x10 cm) for micro-satellites. In the Mars concept, one or more 10 kg spacecraft would be released from a spacecraft approaching Mars. Each MARSdrop spacecraft would include its own atmospheric entry system and a triangular parachute called a parawing to enable gliding to desired destinations. The landers would be small, perhaps 10 kg, and the first will cost $20M to $50M to develop. The scientific payload would be small, perhaps a video camera or multispectral imager, and the first lander would likely be battery powered, limiting its lifetime to a few days.

The idea of small Mars missions seem to be trending, with a Canadian team proposing the Northern Lights mission. The small lander would come with its own instrument suite and arm and would also deploy a small rover that looks to be about the size of the Mars Pathfinder’s Sojourner rover. The program’s web site doesn’t mention any government funding – it appears that the team hopes to raise the few million dollars it believes it needs through crowd sourcing. To me, carrying seven instruments and a rover seems ambitious for first a private Mars mission. Just conducting a successful flight to Mars and then surviving landing (remember that the similar-sized British Beagle 2 lander failed that last test) to take a picture with the equivalent of a cellphone camera would be an outstanding feat. Technology has advanced to the point where micro Mars landers are conceivable; perhaps the Northern Lights team will be the ones to pull it off. Their website is worth a visit because I suspect that some team will put a lander of this scale on Mars in the next two decades.

Each year, NASA solicits ideas for exploration technologies that would push well beyond existing technologies to enable missions that might fly in a decade or two. If these ideas can be made to work, the payback could be enormous (although only a few if any will make it all the way from inspiration to launch pad). This year’s list of funded concept studies was rich in ideas for planetary exploration, and the following paragraphs provide a sampling of the ones I found most intriguing. So that you can get a flavor of the boldness and creativity of these ideas, I’ll let the teams speak for themselves by quoting from their concept summaries.

Titan Submarine: Exploring the Depths of Kraken – Titan’s seas are the only surface oceans other than the Earth’s in the solar system. In the past, several teams have proposed simple floating landers or diving bells to explore these oceans. The Titan Submarine concept, though, would “send a submarine to Titan’s largest northern sea, Kraken Mare. This craft will autonomously carry out detailed scientific investigations under the surface of Kraken Mare, providing unprecedented knowledge of an extraterrestrial sea and expanding NASA’s existing capabilities in planetary exploration to include in situ nautical operations. Sprawling over some 1000 km, with depths estimated at 300 m, Kraken Mare is comparable in size to the Great Lakes and represents an opportunity for an unprecedented planetary exploration mission.” The list of science goals is ambitious: to study the “chemical composition of the liquid, surface and subsurface currents, mixing and layering in the “water” column, tides, wind and waves, bathymetry, and bottom features and composition.”