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Of the other three missions that were given technology development money, I know a bit about NEOCam. You would think that it would be pretty straightforward to put a telescope in orbit and use it to search for near Earth objects. But it turns out that the data processing and analysis is difficult, which is probably why NASA put some development money behind it.However, just because those three proposals received technology development funding does not mean that they have first dibs for the next Discovery selection. There were reportedly 28 proposals during the last round (6 got downselected in some form). That's a lot of proposals, and it indicates that there are a lot of ideas out there. As a well-known space scientist told me a year and a half ago, even if only one in three is a viable mission, that's still a lot of good small science missions that could get funded in the future. The problem is that the administration is not providing the funding necessary to pursue these missions at a healthy pace.
Of the other three missions that were given technology development money, I know a bit about NEOCam. You would think that it would be pretty straightforward to put a telescope in orbit and use it to search for near Earth objects. But it turns out that the data processing and analysis is difficult, which is probably why NASA put some development money behind it.
However, just because those three proposals received technology development funding does not mean that they have first dibs for the next Discovery selection. There were reportedly 28 proposals during the last round (6 got downselected in some form). That's a lot of proposals, and it indicates that there are a lot of ideas out there. As a well-known space scientist told me a year and a half ago, even if only one in three is a viable mission, that's still a lot of good small science missions that could get funded in the future. The problem is that the administration is not providing the funding necessary to pursue these missions at a healthy pace.
