page_title: Selection of Discovery Mission 13 and 14
section_title: Announcement of Opportunity
hierarchical_section_title: Selection of Discovery Mission 13 and 14 / Timeline / Announcement of Opportunity
caption_attribution_description: Fountains of Enceladus Recent Cassini images of Saturn's moon Enceladus backlit by the sun show the fountain-like sources of the fine spray of material that towers over the south polar region. This image was taken looking more or less broadside at the "tiger stripe" fractures observed in earlier Enceladus images. It shows discrete plumes of a variety of apparent sizes above the limb of the moon.
context_page_description: The selection process for Mission 13 and 14 of the Discovery program began in February 2014, as NASA drafted an Announcement of Opportunity for the next Discovery mission. The winning mission proposals received $450 million in funding towards mission development and construction, along with bonus funding if missions were able to incorporate certain technologies. For Discovery Mission 13 and 14, NASA received 28 proposals, 16 of which notably centered around small Solar System bodies. Lucy, a multiple-flyby mission to the Jupiter trojans, and Psyche, a mission to the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, were announced as the winners of the competition in January 2017, with launches in October 2021 and October 2023, respectively.
  Both Lucy and Psyche were part of a finalist shortlist that was announced by NASA in September 2015, which also included DAVINCI, a Venus atmospheric probe, VERITAS, a Venus orbiter in the style of Magellan, and NEOCam, a space observatory focusing on the detection of potentially hazardous Near-Earth objects. It was the first time since the Discovery Mission 7 and 8 selection in 1999 that five finalists were chosen, as opposed to the traditional three.
context_section_description: Following the conclusion of the Discovery Mission 12 competition, the congressional deadline for the next Announcement of Opportunity (AO) was set for May 1, 2014. The United States Congress approved of a $75 million increase in the budget for the Discovery program from the Obama Administration's original FY14 request, as with other divisions and projects at NASA. Officials from NASA's Science Mission Directorate, however, stated in January 2014 that this deadline would not be met, and that it would possibly be delayed by several months. James "Jim" Green, Director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, noted in a press conference that "they gave us the date of May 1st, and that's not realistic," stating that the deadline was not feasible in context of the declining budget allocated for the Discovery program over the past decade. A month later, a draft AO for the 13th mission of the Discovery Program was released by the Goddard Space Flight Center, outlining a process in which three finalists will be chosen to receive $3 million to further develop their proposals, with the winner receiving $450 million in funding to construct their spacecraft and operate the mission, excluding launch costs – a $50 million decrease from the $500 million in funding originally anticipated by NASA. The draft AO, which included potential financial incentives for technologies that would eventually make it into the final AO for Discovery Mission 13, such as the Heat Shield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) and the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) The device will be able to increase spacecraft communications performance and efficiency by 10 to 100 times over conventional means. stated an anticipated release date for the final AO in September 2014 – four months after the original congressional deadline. The official text of the draft was released in full on July 2, 2014, with the final AO being released on November 5.
  28 proposals for the next Discovery mission were received by NASA before its deadline of February 26, 2015. On the day of the deadline, Lockheed Martin Space Systems announced that they were supporting many of the proposals as contractors. While NASA does not disclose which proposals they receive for Discovery program missions, many mission teams went public with their proposals, through various scientific and astronomical meetings and conferences throughout the year. One particular entrant in the competition aimed at Enceladus, the astrobiology Enceladus Life Finder mission, received significant attention from news media over the course of the first round. The Io Volcano Observer was also revealed as an entrant in the competition at the 64th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March 2015 - its third attempt after previously entering in the competitions for Discovery Mission 12 and New Frontiers Mission 3. A number of proposals targeting minor planets were also unveiled by their respective teams through briefings held at the NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group's three-hour meeting on June 30, 2015. During the meeting, three more contractors were revealed as supporting numerous entrants in the competition – Ball Aerospace, Boeing Defense, Space & Security, and Orbital ATK. A notable event that occurred during the competition's first round was the September 2015 announcement of NASA's termination of involvement with the B612 Foundation's Sentinel Space Telescope, an infrared space observatory focused on discovering a number of new Near-Earth objects (NEOs). The mostly similar NEOCam proposal, which was also a NEO-seeking infrared space observatory mission, sought to benefit from the termination of NASA's involvement with Sentinel by acting as a suitable replacement mission.
caption: Enceladus was the target of the largely publicized Enceladus Life Finder proposal.
exif: {}