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fork(2) [soylentnews.org] writes:

      NPR's All Things Considered aired [npr.org] a piece by Nell Greenfieldboyce today (July 5) about what comes next for NASA.

The exploration of our outer solar system is about to hit a real slump.

      NASA is celebrating Juno's arrival at Jupiter, but in less than two years, Juno will be gone -- it's slated to plunge into the gas giant and burn up. The Cassini spacecraft, now orbiting Saturn, will meet the same fate next year.

      "It'll be the first time since the 1970s that there will be no NASA presence in the outer planets," says Casey Dreier [planetary.org], director of space policy at The Planetary Society. "For the first time in 40 years, the lights will go out in the outer solar system."

      NASA does have some upcoming missions closer to home. In September, one mission [asteroidmission.org] will go off toward an asteroid, aiming to return a sample to Earth. And there are a couple of missions that will go back to Mars: a big rover [nasa.gov] in 2020, and a lander [nasa.gov] that was supposed to launch this year but got delayed until 2018.

      "Basically we're suffering now from what were budget cuts to the planetary budget that started in 2013 with the sequester," says Jason Barnes of the University of Idaho, who chairs the division for planetary sciences of the American Astronomical Society.

NASA is now trying to whip up some new adventures, and Congress is getting involved here, too. Lawmakers recently ordered NASA to visit Europa, an icy moon that orbits Jupiter. It may have vast underground oceans, making it an intriguing place to look for life.

      Last year's final appropriations act required NASA to launch a Europa mission no later than 2022, says Dreier, who notes that "people kind of jokingly refer to it as the only mission that would be illegal for NASA not to fly." And the law doesn't just say go to Europa. It says go there on a certain rocket -- one that Congress demanded that NASA build after the retirement of the space shuttles.

      [...]

      There are other places in the outer solar system that NASA would like to visit, too, such as Saturn's moon Titan, which has lakes of liquid methane. And another moon, Enceladus, clearly has an underground store of water. "We see geysers coming out of the southern hemisphere," notes [Jim Green, the director of the planetary science division at NASA].

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