The most important piece of news remains unchanged: the House agrees with the Senate (and with the planetary science community) in funding the 2006 New Horizons mission to Pluto, despite the opposition of the White House and NASA management itself.

Indeed, NASA now seems to be resigning itself to flying this mission. Agency Administrator Sean O'Keefe -- who had consistently pushed a later, more ambitious and more expensive nuclear-electric propelled mission to Pluto, on very unconvincing grounds -- has now indicated that he has no serious objections to incorporating New Horizons into the agency's plans.

And this seems to be borne out by the latest news from other NASA officials regarding the form that will now be taken by the "New Frontiers" program of "medium-class" planetary missions -- which cost between $300 million and $650 million, and will be chosen from competing proposals by independent teams of scientists and companies.

The first Announcement of Opportunity ("AO") requesting team proposals for New Frontiers missions is currently scheduled to be released later this year. The announced plan is to request designs for at least two out of those five overall Solar System mission types that were listed as highest priority by the "Decadal Survey", a report commissioned by NASA and released this summer in which a team connected with the National Academy of Sciences recommended the best scientific form for US planetary exploration through 2013.

But only one proposal -- for a single type of mission -- will ultimately be selected. This odd procedure will be followed in all New Frontiers AOs because these missions are more complex and harder to design than the less expensive Discovery and Explorer missions that are also selected competitively -- if NASA just put out a request for proposals for a single kind of New Frontiers mission, there's a good chance that no acceptable proposal would be returned.

There has, however, been uncertainty as to just how many mission types NASA would request proposals for in this AO. It could be all five, but some NASA representatives had indicated that it would be just two or three. However, it has now been reported to SpaceDaily from reliable sources that the AO will request designs for at least four of the mission types.

The only one not definitely included will be the single mission type highest ranked by the Decadal Survey: a spacecraft to fly by Pluto and several smaller Kuiper Belt objects. This is because New Horizons, if Congress and the White House do indeed fund it (as is probable), completely fills the bill for that mission.

However, if the NASA 2003 appropriations bill to be approved later this year ultimately ends up NOT including New Horizons, requests for new designs for the Pluto-Kuiper mission will indeed be added to the New Frontiers AO -- and, given the importance of launching this mission as soon as possible because of its unique scientific deadline due to Pluto's growing distance from the Sun, another substitute proposal for a Pluto-Kuiper mission would probably be selected as the first New Frontiers mission.

The Decadal Survey had also listed the other four mission types in order of scientific priority -- with a mission to return a sample from the great South Pole-Aitken Basin on the Moon's farside leading the list.

However, NASA's decision means that there is simply no way to tell what the next New Frontiers mission after Pluto-Kuiper will be -- because its wish to minimize the risk that an acceptable team proposal will not be submitted for this New Frontiers AO means that it is unwilling to rule any of the mission types out, or pick the order in which they should fly.

Since NASA will surely provide a similar broad range of choices on all future New Fontiers AOs, it's a safe bet that it will always be impossible to predict in any detail just what order the various types of New Frontiers missions will fly in.

The other three mission types definitely on the list are:

(1) A mission to drop three entry probes into different parts of Jupiter's atmosphere simultaneously to make measurements at a much greater depth than the Galileo entry probe did -- after which the main carrier spacecraft will put itself into a polar orbit around Jupiter to further study the planet's atmospheric makeup and (through gravity and magnetic data) its internal structure.

(2) A mission to land a spacecraft on Venus which would hastily grab a surface sample and then inflate a heat-resistant balloon to loft itself back into the planet's safely cool cloud layer to analyze the sample in leisurely detail (as well as doing atmospheric studies).

(3) A craft to rendezvous with a comet, land very briefly on its nucleus to scoop up a 1-kg sample, and return it to Earth (with the sample being kept cool enough to prevent its water ice from melting, although the lower-temperature ices in it would be allowed to vaporize to cut the mission's cost, with their gases being preserved in the sample container).

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