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Nasa announcement today: 'Major' new mission to explore our solar system to be revealed

Speculation mounts over agency's forthcoming revelation, with some suggesting project may be to extract samples of comet nucleus or journey to Saturn’s largest moon

Thursday 27 June 2019 19:50 BST

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NASA's moon rock lab home to geologic treasures

Nasa is set to reveal plans for a major new science mission to explore the solar system.

The announcement, scheduled for Thursday evening, will detail the space agency's next flagship research project.

While few specifics have been revealed, speculation is mounting that it may be one of two missions: either to extract samples of a comet nucleus and return them to Earth, or a journey to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

:: Follow live updates here

Those rumours circulated after Curt Niebur, lead scientist for the New Frontiers programme, was selected as one of the Nasa panel hosting the teleconference, which will begin at 4pm EDT (9PM BST).

In 2017 Nasa announced it had selected two concepts for a robotic mission planned to launch in the mid-2020s under the New Frontiers banner.

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

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1/21NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Robert McCall’s mid-1970s prediction of NASA’s space shuttle building a modular space station is close to what finally happened, except that the real shuttles only flew one at a time.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Ed White photographed by Gemini 4 Commander Jim McDivitt. During the first of 66 orbits, they made an unsuccessful attempt to rendezvous with the spent upper stage of their Titan launch vehicle. On McDivitt’s advice, White waited one more orbit to recover from the effort of the failed rendezvous, and then exited the Gemini for his historic spacewalk on June 3, 1965.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Apollo 9 CM pilot Dave Scott emerges from the hatch, testing some of the spacesuit systems that will be used for lunar operations. The photo was taken from the hatch of the docked LM by Rusty Schweickart in March 1969.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Mothership “Balls Three” overflies an X-15 in 1961. Three operational X-15s were constructed and flown for 199 test flights between them, as they pushed at the “envelopes” of speed and altitude, and reached the very edges of space.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

The Mercury Control Center (MCC) at Cape Canaveral supervised seven human spaceflights between May 1961 and March 1965, into the beginning of the Gemini era. Meanwhile the more advanced control complex in Houston was taking shape ahead of Apollo.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Technicians working at the base of Alan Shepard’s Mercury-Redstone 3 launch vehicle are swathed in vapour from vented excess oxidiser gas on May 5, 1961. Subsequent rockets could not be so closely approached when fueling.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

The Rendezvous Docking Simulator at Langley prepared Gemini astronauts for the strange physics of orbital flight.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Ahead of Gemini 10, Commander John Young explains to the media how copilot Michael Collins will inspect the Agena Target Docking Vehicle during his spacewalk, 1966.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Navy divers prepare to retrieve the Gemini 6A crew on December 16, 1965. Green dye was released by spacecraft on splashdown, making it easier to spot from the air.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

The U.S. geological Survey’s map of the area around Tycho Crater, famous as the site of a mysterious alien monolith in the 1968 science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In real life, this chaotic and rugged terrain would have been too difficult for an Apollo mission to access.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins inspects NASA’s Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, where rock samples collected by Apollo were analysed. Nitrogen gas protected the rocks from accidental corrosion in Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

NASA scientists are confident that Buzz Aldrin’s boot prints from Apollo 11 are still as sharp and distinct today as when they were first stamped down in 1969, because the Moon has no air or rain to erode them.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

NASA’s Anechoic Chambers are among the quietest places anywhere on earth. Walls absorb almost all stray echoes, whether sound or radio. This 1972 model of a shuttle, being tested for radio characteristics, has thruster pods on the wingtips.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Lightning strikes the launchpad of Space Shuttle Challenger on August 30, 1983 prior to STS-8, the first pre-dawn launch of the space shuttle program. Launchpads are surrounded by tall lightning towers and other conductive systems.These create a giant “Faraday Cage,” diverting the electric charge of strike well away from the spacecraft.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

The ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2000. Its habitable volume is equivalent to a Boeing 747’s. An international crew of six people live and work while traveling at five miles (8 km) per second, orbiting Earth once every 90 minutes. This is the single most complex and ambitious engineering effort in history, even when compared to Apollo.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

The Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) is a hybrid of parachute and balloon technology. A new generation of flexible heat shield materials could enable a huge shield to be deployed from a small storage canister just before a spaceraft hits the atmosphere of its target planet. In July 2012 a HIAD survived a trip through Earth’s atmosphere at 7,600 mph.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

In April 2016, ocean scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, analysing data from Landsat 8, found mysterious lines crisscrossing the vegetation in the shallow waters of the North Caspian Sea.The cause turned out to be ice gouging at the seafloor in winter, before melting in the spring, and leaving just these clues.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Curiosity made this self-portrait on August 5, 2015, by maneuvering the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the end of a seven-foot-long robotic arm. Multiple overlapping frames were acquired, then digitally stitched together by image analysts at JPL. The arm moved into a new position for each frame but the camera always pointed toward a specific “vanishing point” to minimize parallax distortions.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Jupiter's moon Io is dwarfed by the planet it orbits, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft en route to Saturn. Cassini’s 13-year tour of the ringed planet changed the course of planetary exploration.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

A technician prepares to unlatch a small door built into the guide vanes of the Transonic Wind Tunnel at Langley Research Center in 2010. The vanes prevent turbulent eddies from interfering with the tests.

Courtesy of NASA

NASA at 60: Amazing photos of space exploration released from archives

Courtesy of NASA

The first was a Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (Caesar) mission that seeks to return a sample from 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a comet that was explored by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, to determine its origin and history.

The second was Dragonfly, a drone-like aircraft that would explore the habitability of dozens of sites on Saturn’s moon Titan, described by Nasa as an "ocean world in our solar system".

Mysterious glowing light on Mars captured by Nasa's Curiosity probe

The selected mission will become the fourth in the New Frontiers portfolio, its predecessors being the New Horizons mission to Pluto and a Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and OSIRIS-REx, which will rendezvous with and return a sample of the asteroid Bennu.

How to follow the announcement live

The Independent will be providing rolling updates in our own dedicated liveblog.

Nasa will also broadcast the event on its television channel, the agency's website, Facebook, YouTube, Periscope and USTREAM.

The agency will host a media teleconference at 5pm local time the same day with: Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate; Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division; Curt Niebur and the principal investigator of the selected mission.

The teleconference audio will stream live on the Nasa website.

On Monday 1 July Nasa will also host a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) about the mission announcement. Questions can be submitted to the Reddit AMA event when it begins at 3pm.

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