The Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission described herein has been selected for flight to Venus as part of the NASA Discovery Program. DAVINCI will be the first mission to Venus to incorporate science-driven flybys and an instrumented descent sphere into a unified architecture. The anticipated scientific outcome will be a new understanding of the atmosphere, surface, and evolutionary path of Venus as a possibly once-habitable planet and analog to hot terrestrial exoplanets. The primary mission design for DAVINCI as selected features a preferred launch in summer/fall 2029, two flybys in 2030, and descent-sphere atmospheric entry by the end of 2031. The in situ atmospheric descent phase subsequently delivers definitive chemical and isotopic composition of the Venus atmosphere during an atmospheric transect above Alpha Regio. These in situ investigations of the atmosphere and near-infrared (NIR) descent imaging of the surface will complement remote flyby observations of the dynamic atmosphere, cloud deck, and surface NIR emissivity. The overall mission yield will be at least 60 Gbits (compressed) new data about the atmosphere and near surface, as well as the first unique characterization of the deep atmosphere environment and chemistry, including trace gases, key stable isotopes, oxygen fugacity, constraints on local rock compositions, and topography of a tessera.
Launched June 18, 2009, with its primary mission scheduled to end September 2010, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will be the first observatory ever to spend an entire year orbiting and observing the Moon at a low altitude of just 50 km. The spacecraft carries a wide variety of scientific instruments and will provide an extraordinary opportunity to study the lunar landscape at resolutions and over time scales never achieved before. This paper is intended as a companion to the series of papers released simultaneously in this journal detailing LRO's instruments and their planned measurements. The paper describes the design and key performance drivers of the LRO spacecraft and overall mission design. It presents a comprehensive description of the operation of the various systems that comprise the spacecraft and illustrates how these systems enable achievement of the mission requirements.
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