A little over once a decade, through its New Frontiers program, Nasa hosts a battle royale lottery that sets the tone for the agency’s focus on the future of exploration throughout the solar system. This year, in terms of planetary exploration, Nasa decided on sending drones to Titan and a claw-machine to a familiar asteroid.
Nasa’s missions are largely split into three camps, the inexpensive missions, a wide assortment of $600- to $700-million missions like the Discovery endeavors, and then there are Flagship missions that set the agency back a cool $2 billion, which launch around every decade or so. The New Frontiers program is somewhere in between, it’s sort of an engineering Hunger Games for space exploration.