[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

I'm not sure exactly which forum this fits in but NASA has just released the AO for Discovery Program 2006 and Missions of Opportunity. See the Discovery Program Acquisition Home Page for more details. Click on the "Discovery AO" link to download the PDF.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Regarding possible solicitations to the latest Discovery AO: I've been looking for stuff on a possible resubmission of CONTOUR, and have found a piece by Dunham and Farquhar in the May 2004 Annals of the NY Academy of Sciences on the history of trajectory planning for APL's various deep space missions ( http://highorbits.jhuapl.edu/aplmisns.doc ). Be warned that this thing takes forever to download and display -- apparently due to all the drawings in it (plus one reproduction of NEAR's last photo of Eros' surface, with a basketball stuck in it to show how remarkably fine-scale that shot actually was).

At its very end, however, we have a mention of APL's definite plan to submit CONTOUR 2 to the "next Discovery AO" -- which I presume was the abortive one for Discovery 11 -- and a chart of several possible multiple-comet missions for it. All these assume a launch in Oct. 2007, followed by a flyby of Grigg-Skjellerup the following March -- which can't be done now, since the mission if selected this time can't possibly be ready that early. But they then include 2 Earth flybys, with the second in July 2010 -- which COULD be replaced by a direct launch from Earth on that date -- followed by a flyby of Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova in August 2011. After that there are several alternative mission continuations that would allow flyby of one more comet, and one that would allow flybys of two more: Finlay in Dec. 2014 and Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (the fragmented comet that would have been the original CONTOUR's second stop) in Sept. 2022. This last scenario would be followed by another Earth flyby in July 2027 that could presumably be used to set up a fourth comet flyby later, if the craft is still working.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

At its very end, however, we have a mention of APL's definite plan to submit CONTOUR 2 to the "next Discovery AO" -- which I presume was the abortive one for Discovery 11 -- and a chart of several possible multiple-comet missions for it.

If a "CONTOUR-2" is proposed and selected under the Discovery 2006 AO, and if the "Dawn re-rising" somehow materializes, I think a reasonable person might suspect the Discovery Program mission line is simply morphing into an asteroid/comet exploration program.