Every few years, NASA announces its next wave of solar system exploration. This year, the four finalists for the space agency's Discovery Missions were announced and they all shared one conspicuous feature: volcanoes.
Potential missions to Venus, Io and Triton are on the table and two of the four proposed missions will be picked to continue development. This new batch of potential missions each receive three million dollars to construct a full mission plan to prove their value and feasibility.
The Discovery Missions are not the big flagship missions like Galileo or New Horizons. Instead, they're more targeted missions with smaller budgets that can nevertheless produce amazing results. Alumni of the Discovery Mission program include Mercury's MESSENGER, the comet hunter Deep Impact and Dawn's visits to Vesta and Ceres.
The four finalists propose to visit three potential worlds, all of which have not been closely studied by an American mission ...
