Nov. 16, 2015

PSI researchers are working on four of five Discovery missions selected for further consideration by NASA. One or two of the missions will be selected for flight opportunities as early as 2020.
Each of the five teams selected will receive $3 million to conduct concept design studies and analyses. After a detailed review and evaluation of the concept studies, NASA will make the final selections by September 2016 for continued development leading up to launch. Any final selected mission will cost approximately $500 million, not including launch vehicle funding or the cost of post-launch operations.
Three PSI researchers – Mark Sykes, Vishnu Reddy and Tommy Grav – will serve as Co-Investigators on the Near Earth Object Camera (NEOcam) mission, which would discover 10 times more near-Earth objects than all NEOs discovered to date.

PSI Senior Scientist David Grinspoon is a Co-Investigator on the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission. DAVINCI would study the chemical composition of Venus’ atmosphere during a 63-minute descent. It would answer scientific questions that have been considered high priorities for many years, such as whether there are volcanoes active today on the surface of Venus and how the surface interacts with the atmosphere of the planet.
PSI Senior Scientist Thomas Prettyman is a Co-Investigator and member of the gamma ray and neutron spectrometer team on the Psyche mission that would explore the origin of planetary cores by studying the metallic asteroid Psyche. This asteroid is likely the survivor of a violent hit-and-run with another object that stripped off the outer, rocky layers of a protoplanet.

PSI Senior Scientist Darby Dyar is a Co-Investigator on the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) team that would fly a shorter-wavelength radar instrument to map Venus again at much higher resolution over the course of three Venus years.
Above, the NEOCam space telescope will survey the regions of space closest to the Earth's orbit, where potentially hazardous asteroids are most likely to be found.