We here at SciShow Space spend a lot of time telling you about what astronomers and astronauts
have done and are doing right now.
But today, we want to share news about what space scientists want to discover in the future!
Last week, NASA announced the 5 finalists for what may eventually be their next missions
into space.
The projects are all part of NASA’s Discovery program, which aims to launch low-cost, high-impact
missions every few years.
The five mission teams that have been chosen are each getting 3 million dollars to develop
their ideas, and in September 2016, NASA will choose one, or maybe two, to launch sometime
before 2021.
Two of the proposals involve a trip to Venus, while the other three have to do with asteroids
-- including one that’s made of … metal.
NASA hasn’t been to Venus since the Magellan probe stopped by in 1994, and we have a /lot/
left to learn about our next-door neighbor.
So the VERITAS probe would spend three Venus-years in orbit there -- or a little less than two
Earth years -- mapping the planet using radar.
A camera wouldn’t really work since Venus is covered in thick clouds.
The new map would be much more detailed than the one Magellan made, and would hopefully
tell us whether Venus has active volcanoes, which scientists have been debating for a
while.
The other Venus mission, called DAVINCI, would get an even closer view of the planet, dropping
a metal, sensor-filled ball through its atmosphere.
The ball would have 63 minutes before it hit the ground, and it would use that time to
take measurements and send them back to Earth.
We’d also get the first pictures of Venus’ surface since the 1970s!
Researchers specifically want to check out weird ridges on the planet’s surface known
as tesserae, which seem to have formed from the very oldest pieces of the planet’s crust.
The asteroid missions, meanwhile, are a little more varied.
One of them, called Psyche, is a probe that would visit an unusual asteroid called…
Psyche.
Most asteroids are made of rock, and some have metal in them, too -- metal that companies
plan to mine someday.
But based on its density, and how reflective it is, Psyche is almost entirely metal, and
probably also … magnetic.
It’s possible that this thing might be the core of an asteroid that lost most of its
rock in a collision with something else -- but we probably won’t know for sure until we
get there.
It’s nothing like anything we’ve explored before, so this mission has a lot of potential
to serve up some awesome science.
But another asteroid probe, Lucy, would visit four different asteroids -- one from the asteroid
belt between Mars and Jupiter, and three of the so-called Trojan asteroids, which hang
out in Jupiter’s orbit.
Scientists think that the Trojan asteroids originally came from the Kuiper belt, the
band of space beyond Neptune where there are lots of icy objects that are probably left
over from the formation of the solar system.
So studying them would be a good way to learn more about how our solar system developed,
without having to go all the way out to Kuiper Country.
Finally, the fifth mission, NEOCam, would do a lot without having to go too far.
Asteroids hitting Earth have caused major extinctions in the past, so it’s not really
surprising that people are worried about another one -- including the US government, which
has told NASA that by 2020, it has to find 90 percent of all near-Earth objects that
are more than 140 meters across.
But searching for these objects is hard to do from Earth, where the brightness of the
Sun blocks out a lot of them.
So the NEOCam mission would plant a space telescope in Earth’s L1 point, the spot
between the Sun and Earth where their gravitational pulls balance out.
From there, it would be able to detect around a million more asteroids -- including almost
all of the ones that could threaten Earth, and also some that are less than 140 meters
across.
It would also study those asteroids to help figure out how they formed -- and hopefully
find new, interesting targets for future space missions.
It’s very frustrating to me that we can’t just do all five of these things.
None of them are particularly expensive, but we have to pick.
So out of all these possible missions, which one do you want NASA to pick?
A return to Venus?
A trip to a weird magnetic metal asteroid?
Or a telescope for finding space-rocks that want to punch Earth in the face?
Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow Space News, and especially thanks to this
month’s President of Space, the newly-engaged Ry Prindle who says, “Give more than you
take.
And for Nerdfighters who want to know: Alana and Ry are keeping each other for time and
all eternity.”
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