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NASA Mission Classes
Discovery Mission Class
These small missions, carried out through the Discovery Program, range in cost from $300-$500 million. These are competed Principal Investigator (PI)-led missions that allow fast response to address a specific set of high value scientific questions at targets that may be less technically challenging. For this reason, Discovery will pay a crucial role, as described below, in the exploration of small bodies-asteroids, comets-that provide key clues to the chemistry of solar system formation, impact hazards through time, and the shaping of the architecture of our own planetary system.
New Frontiers Mission Class
Medium-class missions, called New Frontiers Missions, range in cost from $500-$800 million. New Frontiers missions are also competed PI-led, but respond to strategic targets specified in the Solar system Roadmap and in other planning documents. New Frontiers missions will enable aspects of the exploration of a range of objects, from Venus to giant planets, but will be limited in scope in terms of the complexity of operational capabilities at these bodies. Hence, they too will play key roles in Solar system exploration, but cannot achieve all of the measurement and exploration objectives necessary to answer the basic questions that can be better answered with robotic exploration of the planets.
Flagship Mission Class
The largest missions, known as Flagship Missions, range between $2 billion and $3 billion. These missions will be crucial in allowing us to reach and explore difficult, but high-priority targets. These critically important targets could help establish the limits of habitability, not just for our Solar system, but for planetary systems in general. In particular, they potentially provide an opportunity to identify pre-biotic organic molecules or even extant life beyond Earth, should it exist, in our own Solar system. The targets of flagship missions may include complex missions to the clouds and surface of Venus; the lower atmosphere and surface of Titan; the surface and subsurface of Europa; the deep atmosphere of Neptune and the surface of its moon Triton; and the surface of a comet nucleus in the form of cryogenically preserved samples.
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