Discovery 15 & 16

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

NASA has announced the finalists for missions 15 and 16 of the Discovery Program. The four finalists will receive a total of $12M to complete their conceptual design studies on the next nine months, after which NASA will choose two candidates to develop into actual missions.

This process is enormously frustrating, because all the finalists and semi-finalists are/were enormously exciting mission concepts. The fours finalists are DAVINCI+ (a Venus atmosphere probe and orbiter), Io Volcano Observer (a multiple-flyby mission to Jupiter's moon Io), TRIDENT (a single-flyby mission to Neptune's moon Triton), and VERITAS (a Venus geology orbiter).

Based on the brief descriptions and without looking deeply into the technical details of the proposals, I lean a bit towards TRIDENT and IVO. TRIDENT, in particular, is planning to use a series of flyby maneuvers to reach Neptune in a reasonable timeframe, which won't be available in future Discovery slots. IVO isn't exactly as urgent, but would still take quite some time to reach the Jovian system. I don't see giant leaps and bounds in interplanetary flight times coming up (unless my thesis work goes where I hope it does), so the wait calculation suggests we launch sooner rather than later.

Venus, meanwhile, is one of the easiest planetary targets in the Solar System, with launch windows every nineteen months. Delaying a Venus mission isn't as impactful as delaying other sorts of missions. That said, Venus has been underserved as a destination of unmanned probes in recent decades, partially due to the fact that reaching Venus isn't really all that impressive of an achievement, and because it doesn't produce pretty pictures which keep the public excited about paying for expensive exploration missions. Europe and Japan still consider it a valid target, but that doesn't mean NASA should neglect it, either, especially since we're probably the only country right now which could pull off an atmosphere probe like DAVINCI+ is proposing.

It's not my decision, of course, but it'll be very interesting to see which missions NASA opts to develop.