NASA's Top Priority: Mission to Mars

A showdown over the course of Solar System exploration has ended with a qualified victory for Mars.

NASA's planetary-science decadal survey, which sets mission priorities for 2013–22, firmly favours a mission to Mars over a rival one to Jupiter's icy moon Europa (see Nature 466, 168–169; 2010). But the decision marks the beginning of a much bigger battle: to secure the budget to lift the multibillion-dollar project off the survey's pages and into the heavens.


Committee on the Planetary Science Decadal Survey Space Studies Board Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, National Research Council of the National Academies Vision and Voyages for Planetary Science in the Decade 2013-2022 (National Academies, 2011); available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13117

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Original content Bob DeMarco, Look Beyond the Obvious