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NASA NTRS2000

A Mars Exploration Discovery Program

The Mars Exploration Program should consider following the Discovery Program model. In the Discovery Program a team of scientists led by a PI develop the science goals of their mission, decide what payload achieves the necessary measurements most effectively, and then choose a spacecraft with the capabilities needed to carry the payload to the desired target body. The primary constraints associated with the Discovery missions are time and money. The proposer must convince reviewers that their mission has scientific merit and is feasible. Every Announcement of Opportunity has resulted in a collection of creative ideas that fit within advertised constraints. Following this model, a "Mars Discovery Program" would issue an Announcement of Opportunity for each launch opportunity with schedule constraints dictated by the launch window and fiscal constraints in accord with the program budget. All else would be left to the proposer to choose, based on the science the team wants to accomplish, consistent with the program theme of "Life, Climate and Resources". A proposer could propose a lander, an orbiter, a fleet of SCOUT vehicles or penetrators, an airplane, a balloon mission, a large rover, a small rover, etc. depending on what made the most sense for the science investigation and payload. As in the Discovery program, overall feasibility relative to cost, schedule and technology readiness would be evaluated and be part of the selection process.

Hansen, C. J.↗
NASA NTRS2000

Getting Involved with the Discovery Program

NASA's Discovery Program represents the implementation of NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin's vision of 'faster, better, cheaper' planetary missions; encompasses a series of low-cost solar system exploration missions intended to accomplish high quality, focused planetary science investigations using innovative, streamlined, and efficient approaches to assure the highest science value for the cost; and aims to enhance our understanding of the solar system by exploring the planets, their moons and other small bodies, either by traveling to them or remotely from the vicinity of Earth. The objectives of this program include the following: (1) Provide exciting and important scientific data to the global community; (2) Pursue new and innovative ways of doing business; (3) Encourage technological development by designing and testing new technologies and transferring them to the private sector; (4) Increase public awareness of, and appreciation for, solar system exploration through exciting education and public outreach activities; (5) Support national education initiatives through mission-specific programs; and (6) Ensure participation of small disadvantaged businesses, women-owned businesses, HBCUs, and other minority educational institutions in procurements.

Asplund, Shari↗
NASA NTRS2007

NASA's Discovery Program: Moving Toward the Edge (of the Solar System)

NASA's Planetary Science , Division sponsors a competitive program of small spacecraft missions with the goal of performing focused science investigations that complement NASA's larger planetary science explorations at relatively low cost. The goal of the Discovery program is to launch many smaller missions with fast development times to increase our understanding of the solar system by exploring the planets, dwarf planets, their moons, and small bodies such as comets and asteroids. Discovery missions are solicited from the broad planetary science community approximately every 2 years. Active missions within the Discovery program include several with direct scientific or engineering connections to potential future missions to the edge of the solar system and beyond. In addition to those in the Discovery program are the missions of the New Frontiers program. The first New Frontiers mission. is the New Horizons mission to Pluto, which will explore this 38-AU distant dwarf planet and potentially some Kuiper Belt objects beyond. The Discovery program's Dawn mission, when launched in mid-2007, will use ion drive as its primary propulsion system. Ion propulsion is one of only two technologies that appear feasible for early interstellar precursor missions with practical flight times. The Kepler mission will explore the structure and diversity of extrasolar planetary systems, with an emphasis on the detection of Earth-size planets around other stars. Kepler will survey nearby solar systems searching for planets that may fall within the habitable zone,' a region surrounding a star within which liquid water may exist on a planet's surface - an essential ingredient for life as we know it. With its open and competitive approach to mission selections, the Discovery program affords scientists the opportunity to propose missions to virtually any solar system destination. With its emphasis on science and proven openness to the use of new technologies such as ion propulsion, missions flown as part of the program will test out technologies needed for future very deep-space exploration and potentially take us to these difficult and distant destinations.

Johnson, Les↗
NASA NTRS1992

NASA Discovery Program Workshop

The purpose of the workshop was to review concepts for Discover-class missions that would follow the first two missions (MESUR-Pathfinder and NEAR) of this new program. The concepts had been generated by scientists involved in NASA's Solar System Exploration Program to carry out scientifically important investigations within strict guidelines -- $150 million cap on development cost and 3 year cap on development schedule. Like the Astrophysics Small Explorers (SMEX), such 'faster and cheaper' missions could provide vitality to solar system exploration research by returning high quality data more frequently and regularly and by involving many more young researchers than normally participate directly in larger missions. An announcement of opportunity (AO) to propose a Discovery mission to NASA is expected to be released in about two years time. One purpose of the workshop was to assist Code SL in deciding how to allocate its advanced programs resources. A second, complimentary purpose was to provide the concept proposers with feedback to allow them to better prepare for the AO.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS1995

Workshop on Discovery Lessons-Learned

As part of the Discovery Program's continuous improvement effort, a Discovery Program Lessons-Learned workshop was designed to review how well the Discovery Program is moving toward its goal of providing low-cost research opportunities to the planetary science community while ensuring continued U.S. leadership in solar system exploration. The principal focus of the workshop was on the recently completed Announcement of Opportunity (AO) cycle, but the program direction and program management were also open to comment. The objective of the workshop was to identify both the strengths and weaknesses of the process up to this point, with the goal of improving the process for the next AO cycle. The process for initializing the workshop was to solicit comments from the communities involved in the program and to use the feedback as the basis for establishing the workshop agenda. The following four sessions were developed after reviewing and synthesizing both the formal feedback received and informal feedback obtained during discussions with various participants: (1) Science and Return on Investment; (2) Technology vs. Risk; Mission Success and Other Factors; (3) Cost; and (4) AO.AO Process Changes and Program Management.

Saunders, M.↗
NASA NTRS2014

Feedback-Driven Dynamic Invariant Discovery

Program invariants can help software developers identify program properties that must be preserved as the software evolves, however, formulating correct invariants can be challenging. In this work, we introduce iDiscovery, a technique which leverages symbolic execution to improve the quality of dynamically discovered invariants computed by Daikon. Candidate invariants generated by Daikon are synthesized into assertions and instrumented onto the program. The instrumented code is executed symbolically to generate new test cases that are fed back to Daikon to help further re ne the set of candidate invariants. This feedback loop is executed until a x-point is reached. To mitigate the cost of symbolic execution, we present optimizations to prune the symbolic state space and to reduce the complexity of the generated path conditions. We also leverage recent advances in constraint solution reuse techniques to avoid computing results for the same constraints across iterations. Experimental results show that iDiscovery converges to a set of higher quality invariants compared to the initial set of candidate invariants in a small number of iterations.

Daikon↗
NASA NTRS1990

A small missions program for investigation of near-earth asteroids

Current studies are examining the feasibility and possible content of the Discovery Program, a series of 'Explorer-class' missions to planetary targets. Organized as a multi-layer program with constant funding, the Discovery Program would support lower cost exploration opportunities that are missed in the new start procedure for larger missions. One approach to such a program is to focus on rendezvous missions to several near-Earth asteroids to characterize basic properties of this group of objects. A sample program is presented that visits six different targets over twelve years, using direct low energy trajectories; some of these are newly identified. Each flight in the program delivers a payload capable of addressing science objectives within the expected budget and programmatic constraints of small planetary missions. The key to satisfying the constraints is a disciplined program management philosophy, consistently applied over the entire program, that makes extensive use of hardware designs developed for other programs.

Stancati, M. L.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Future Mission Proposal Opportunities: Discovery, New Frontiers, and Project Prometheus

The NASA Office of Space Science is expanding opportunities to propose missions to comets, asteroids, and other solar system targets. The Discovery Program continues to be popular, with two sample return missions, Stardust and Genesis, currently in operation. The New Frontiers Program, a new proposal opportunity modeled on the successful Discovery Program, begins this year with the release of its first Announcement of Opportunity. Project Prometheus, a program to develop nuclear electric power and propulsion technology intended to enable a new class of high-power, high-capability investigations, is a third opportunity to propose solar system exploration. All three classes of mission include a commitment to provide data to the Planetary Data System, any samples to the NASA Curatorial Facility at Johnson Space Center, and programs for education and public outreach.

Niebur, S. M.↗
NASA NTRS1994

Discovery Planetary Mission Operations Concepts

The NASA Discovery Program of small planetary missions will provide opportunities to continue scientific exploration of the solar system in today's cost-constrained environment. Using a multidisciplinary team, JPL has developed plans to provide mission operations within the financial parameters established by the Discovery Program. This paper describes experiences and methods that show promise of allowing the Discovery Missions to operate within the program cost constraints while maintaining low mission risk, high data quality, and reponsive operations.

low cost planetary exploration Discovery mission o↗
DOE OSTI2024

Final results of the search for new Milky Way satellites in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program survey: Discovery of two more candidates

Abstract We present the final results of our search for new Milky Way (MW) satellites using the data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Subaru Strategic Program (SSP) survey over ∼1140 deg2. In addition to three candidates that we have already reported, we have identified two new MW satellite candidates in the constellations of Sextans, at a heliocentric distance of D⊙ ≃ 126 kpc, and Virgo, at D⊙ ≃ 151 kpc, named Sextans II and Virgo III, respectively. Their luminosities (Sext II: MV ≃ −3.9 mag; Vir III: MV ≃ −2.7 mag) and half-light radii (Sext II: rh ≃ 154 pc; Vir III: rh ≃ 44 pc) place them in the region of size–luminosity space of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies (UFDs). Including four previously known satellites, there are a total of nine satellites in the HSC-SSP footprint. This discovery rate of UFDs is much higher than that predicted from the recent models for the expected population of MW satellites in the framework of cold dark matter models, thereby suggesting that we encounter a too many satellites problem. Possible solutions to settle this tension are also discussed.

Homma, Daisuke↗
NASA NTRS2015

NASA Space Science Day Events-Engaging Students in Science

The NASA Space Science Day Event follows the same format of planning and execution at all host universities and colleges. These institutions realized the importance of such an event and sought funding to continue hosting NSSD events. In 2014, NASA Johnson Space Center ARES team has supported the following universities and colleges that have hosted a NSSD event; the University of Texas at Brownsville, San Jacinto College, Georgia Tech University and Huston-Tillotson University. Other universities and colleges are continuing to conduct their own NSSD events. NASA Space Science Day Events are supported through continued funding through NASA Discovery Program. Community Night begins with a NASA speaker and Astromaterials display. The entire community surrounding the host university or college is invited to the Community Night. This year at the Huston-Tillotson (HTU) NSSD, we had Dr. Laurie Carrillo, a NASA Engineer, speak to the public and students. She answered questions, shared her experiences and career path. The speaker sets a tone of adventure and discovery for the NSSD event. After the speaker, the public is able to view Lunar and Meteorite samples and ask questions from the ARES team. The students and teachers from nearby schools attended the NSSD Event the following day. Students are able to see the university or college campus and the university or college mentors are available for questions. Students rotate through hour long Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) sessions and a display area. These activities are from the Discovery Program activities that tie in directly with k- 12 instruction. The sessions highlight the STEM in exploration and discovery. The Lunar and Meteorite display is again available for students to view and ask questions. In the display area, there are also other interactive displays. Angela Green, from San Jacinto College, brought the Starlab for students to watch a planetarium exhibit for the NSSD at Huston-Tillotson University. Many HTU mentors were leading activities in the display room such as build a comet, volcano layering and robotics manipulation. Students were exposed to a variety STEM career possibilities and information. The students could relate the displays and sessions to what they were learning in school. The HTU mentors made the connection clear for the students. The students ended the event with a mission design presentation. They were able to take what they had learned during the day and were able to create a mission. Students presented their Mission Design and gained confidence in STEM. Conclusion: NASA Space Science Day Events provides an out of school experiential learning environment for students to enhance their STEM curriculum and let students see a college campus. The experiences students gain from attending NSSD gives them the confidence to see themselves on a college campus, possibly majoring in a STEM degree, and understand the importance of completing school.

Foxworth, S.↗
NASA NTRS1996

Review of NASA's Planned Mars Program

The exploration of Mars has long been a prime scientific objective of the U.S. planetary exploration program. Yet no U.S. spacecraft has successfully made measurements at Mars since the Viking missions of the late 1970s. Mars Observer, which was designed to conduct global observations from orbit, failed just before orbit insertion in 1993. The Russian spacecraft Phobos 2 did succeed in making some observations of the planet in 1989, but it was designed primarily to observe Phobos, the innermost satellite of Mars; the spacecraft failed 2 months after insertion into Mars orbit during the complex maneuvers required to rendezvous with the martian satellite. In fall 1996 NASA plans to launch Mars Pathfinder for a landing on the martian surface in mid-1997. This spacecraft is one of the first two missions in NASA's Discovery program that inaugurates a new style of planetary exploration in which missions are low-cost (less than $150 million) and have very focused science objectives. As can be seen in the comparative data presented in Box 1, this mission is considerably smaller in terms of cost, mass, and scope than NASA's previous Mars missions. NASA's FY 1995 budget initiated a continuing Mars exploration program, called Mars Surveyor, that involves multiple launches of spacecraft as small as or smaller than Mars Pathfinder to Mars over the next several launch opportunities, which recur roughly every 26 months. The first mission in the program, Mars Global Surveyor, set for launch late in 1996, is intended to accomplish many of the objectives of the failed Mars Observer. Like the Discovery program, Mars Surveyor is a continuing series of low-cost missions, each of which has highly focused science objectives. See Box 1 for comparative details of those Surveyor missions currently defined. Around the same time that the Mars Surveyor series was chosen as the centerpiece of NASA's solar system exploration program, the Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX) designated Mars as one of four scientific targets for emphasis in future studies. It was against this background that the Space Studies Board charged COMPLEX to review whether the Mars Pathfinder and Surveyor programs, as presently conceived, satisfy the highest priorities for understanding Mars as provided in its report, An Integrated Strategy for the Planetary Sciences: 1995-2010. The present document is COMPLEX's assessment of the scientific potential of NASA's new approach to Mars exploration. This assessment considers how well the scientific objectives of the Mars Surveyor program match those of the Integrated Strategy; it also addresses some advantages and disadvantages of the smaller-faster-cheaper approach to the exploration of Mars. The capabilities of the various instruments are not discussed in detail since the Mars Observer instruments, all of which are scheduled for reflight, have already been assessed by COMPLEX2 and later instruments are, in general, not yet well defined.

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NASA NTRS1997

Venus 2000 Mission Design

As part of the Discovery Program, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has solicited proposals for inter-planetary research to conduct solar system exploration science investigations. A mission, called Venus 2000 (V2k), has been proposed for exploration of the Venus Atmosphere. This is NASAs first voyage to Venus to investigate key science objectives since Magellan and will be launched in summer 2002. In keeping with discovery program requirements to reduce total mission cost and utilize new technology, V2k mission design and control will focus on the use of innovative and proven trajectory analysis programs and control systems provided by the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

Folta, David↗
NASA NTRS2013

Ion Propulsion: An Enabling Technology for the Dawn Mission

The Dawn mission, part of NASA's Discovery Program, has as its goal the scientific exploration of the two most massive main-belt asteroids, 4 Vesta, and the dwarf planet 1 Ceres. The Dawn spacecraft was launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on September 27, 2007 on a Delta-II 7925H-9.5 rocket that placed the 1218-kg spacecraft into an Earth-escape (heliocentic) trajectory with an escape velocity of 11 km/s. On-board the spacecraft is an ion propulsion system (IPS) developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory which will provide an additional delta-V of approximately 11 km/s for the heliocentric transfers to each body and for all orbit transfers including orbit capture/escape and transition to the various science orbits. Deterministic thrusting to Vesta began in December 2007 and concluded with orbit capture at Vesta in July 2011. The transfer to Vesta included a Mars gravity assist flyby in February 2009 that provided an additional delta-V of 2.6 km/s and was the only post-launch mission delta-V not provided by IPS. The IPS was used during the 14 months at Vesta for all science orbit transfers and then for Vesta escape. Deterministic thrusting for Ceres began in late August 2012 with a planned arrival date at Ceres in early 2015, whereupon IPS will be used for all science orbit transfers. As of January 2013 the IPS has been operated for approximately 28,000 hours, consumed approximately 280 kg of xenon, and provided a delta-V of approximately 7.5 km/s, the most post-launch delta-V of any spacecraft yet flown. IPS performance characteristics are very close to the expected performance based on analysis and testing performed pre-launch. Use of the IPS together with a medium-priced launch vehicle enabled this high delta-V mission to be performed within the Discovery Program cost cap. This paper provides an overview of the Dawn IPS and its mission operations through departure for Ceres.

Dawn mission overview↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Genesis Solar Wind – Capture, Return, Curate and Analyze: Looking Backward and Creating a Timeline

Introduction: In 1997 NASA’S Discovery Program selected the Genesis mission proposal to return solar wind samples to Earth for laboratory analyses. Principal Investigator Donald S. Burnett and the science team defined the purity of collector materials and ability to analyze solar wind composition to the precision required for planetary science. As a small mission, focused on a well-defined science goal, yet needing careful attention to engineering details, the communication among scientists and engineers, nurtured by Don Burnett, was exceptional. Genesis Mission and Curation Legacy: Genesis, as the first U. S. spacecraft to return astromaterial samples since Apollo, not only integrated the mission planning and flight teams, but also the science and sample curation teams during the mission development period. Since Genesis is a sample return mission, the Science Team was essential in certifying the collectors (sample containers for solar atoms). From inception, Genesis established mission funding for returned sample curation. JSC was lead in contamination control during mission preparation, including establishment of an ISO 4 cleanroom facility and use of ultrapure water (UPW) for cleaning flight hardware (and, as it turned out, for cleaning collectors after the mishap). Reliable, fast communication among scientists, engineers and curators at the hands-on level established deep respect among team members and efficient decision-making. JSC’s 50-years of astromaterial sample curation provided experienced sample processors onsite during recovery in Utah (a deep bench for emergency response). Post-recovery curation included iterative collaboration with science sample users to clean or verify cleanliness of samples. The science legacy from Genesis is addressed by Burnett and Jurewicz, this volume. In The Beginning: After Apollo sample return, Burnett and Marcia Neugebauer at JPL began discussing a solar wind sample return, with Neugebauer arguing that separate collection of solar wind regimes was essential science. By 1992 a solar wind sample return mission was presented at a workshop, and by 1994 a mission was proposed named Suess-Urey. The mission was re-proposed under a new name GENESIS and selected in 1997. Susan Niebur captured the Genesis mission history and stories, from high level management documents and from many interviews with participants [2]. Her account lets readers glimpse personality of participants in quotations from interviews. Need and Scope for Detailed Technical Timeline: A timeline constructed from lower level task documents has been initiated to document the resources and skills actually used, as well as task sequence or concurrency. Timelines for high level mission events are captured in two documents [1] [2] and for detailed re-entry events in [3]. A detailed technical timeline for Genesis mission and curation activities will provide data points for lower level tasks, such as ISO 4 curation facility construction time, preparation for nominal sample field recovery, mishap recovery, and UPW expansion. Changes in technology context 1990-2024: Semiconductor technologies were easily accessible in the U.S.A. (1990-1999), and the Genesis team used those resources for cleanroom design and UPW system expansion. Image documentation was changing from film to digital during cleanroom construction and payload cleaning (1997-2001). Engineering design was done using computer aided design proprietary software, making more difficult the archiving of payload configuration and materials. Email of documents, tracked delivery service and virtual meeting capability greatly improved communication efficiency. Information sources – Pre-launch mission preparation: Examples of mission science, engineering and contamination control are collector purity testing, payload design/fabrication and ISO 4 cleanroom construction. Information on timing of these activities comes from facility readiness reviews, management reviews, shipping documents, procurement documents, test reports, travel documents, laboratory logs, Quality Assurance documents, dates on images, participant notebooks and emails. Information sources – Sample return re-entry and field recovery activities: Information comes from event timelines produced by Mid-Air Recovery team, Lockheed team lead notes and from chase video, JPL Quality Assurance. Information also comes from images and logbooks from UTTR cleanroom operations and from curatorial documents. Information sources – Resulting science and sample cleaning processes: Agendas from the annual gatherings of the science team initially trace testing for collector purity/cleanliness, and after sample recovery, include collector cleaning and cleanliness assessment. Post-recovery documents include curatorial orders and procedures, sample allocation documents and LPSC abstracts. Timeline Objectives: A simple spreadsheet timeline with headers DATE, EVENT, PEOPLE, COMMENT, INFORMATION SOURCE has been initiated and currently has over 90 entries. While this is not definitive historical research, it is a quick look at the evolution of Genesis curation with pointers to documents or people with information. Engineers for future missions may find useful points of comparison for development of facilities. References:[1] Genesis Mission Reference Document, (2011) JPL D-62382.[2] Niebur S. M., edited by Brown D. W. (2023) NASA’s Discovery Program: The First 20 Years of Competitive Planetary Exploration, NASA-SP-2023-4238.[3] Genesis Mishap Investigation Board Report, Vol. 1 (July 2005).

solar wind↗