Discovery Program
NASA's Discovery Program is a series of lower-cost, highly focused scientific space missions. It was founded to implement NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin's vision of "faster, better, cheaper" planetary missions.
Completed missions:
Partially successful missions:
- Genesis, a mission to collect solar wind particles, successfully did so, but the return capsule's parachute failed to deploy and the capsule crashed into the Utah desert; preliminary reports suggest that some of the samples survived the impact and that a good deal of scientific data may still be learned from them.
Failed missions:
- CONTOUR, a mission to visit several comets, exploded shortly after its launch.
Missions in progress:
- Stardust, a mission to a collect samples from a comet's tail, has successfully collected its samples, and is on its way to Earth to return them.
- MESSENGER, a mission to Mercury, was launched in August, 2004, and is on its way to the planet via a circuitous route.
- ASPERA-3 is a 'Discovery Mission of Opportunity' (a NASA-designed instrument on board another space agency's spacecraft). It is designed to study the interaction between the solar wind and the atmosphere of Mars, and is on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter.
Forthcoming missions:
- Deep Impact, a mission to study a comet, will be launched in December, 2004.
- Dawn, to be launched in 2006, is a mission to study the large asteroids Ceres and Vesta.
- The Kepler Space Observatory, scheduled for launch in 2007, will use a unique spaceborne telescope specifically designed to search for Earth-like planets around stars beyond our solar system.
Forthcoming Discovery highlights
