 NASA's New Frontiers program has taken us to an asteroid with OSIRIS-REx, to Jupiter with Juno, and to the frigid outer reaches of our solar system with the New Horizons mission. And now NASA's getting ready to select their fourth, and they've down selected to two. And this is your space pod for January 11th, 2018. Two missions have been chosen to go forward with development. Now both of them are doing completely different types of science, but the exciting thing about both of them is that they're doing things that we've never done before. Now the first of those two missions that was chosen is called CESAR, and that stands for Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return. Now it's actually going to launch the comet 67P, also known as Churruyamov-Gerasimenko, and that will occur in sometime in the mid-2020s. Now if 67P's name sounds familiar to you, that's because it was the target of the European Space Agency's wildly successful Rosetta mission from 2014 to 2016. Now by going to a comet that's already been studied in as great detail as Churruyuri has, the operational risk is minimized. That means that because we've mapped it, we basically understand all of the problems that come with it. Now it's going to use an arm, and CESAR will approach the surface, and it will grab two distinct samples from the surface of Churruyuri. That would be one of non-volatile materials, basically stuff that isn't ice, and then another of volatile materials which is ice, and then it will place at least 100 grams of cometary material into a sample container to be supplied by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. And that sample would eventually return to Earth sometime in 2038. Now those samples, if this mission goes forward, would be the first pieces of a comet's nucleus actually retrieved for us to study in laboratories here on Earth. And another bonus, CESAR is being led by Steve Squires, who is also the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover program. Now the other mission is called Dragonfly, and it's quite an ambitious one. It also would launch in the mid-2020s, but Dragonfly would arrive at its target, which is Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in 2034. Now it would descend through the atmosphere like the Huygens Lander did in 2005, but the Silmin LEDs, they would end there. It would then deploy a rotorcraft, a fly in the atmosphere of Titan, which sounds difficult, but actually it's easier to fly in the atmosphere of Titan, because Titan's atmosphere is thicker than the Earth's, and the gravitational pull on the surface of Titan is also quite a bit less than Earth's as well. Now Dragonfly would initially land and study its surroundings, and then it would activate eight rotors and take off to another interesting area, traveling anywhere from a few hundred meters to potentially several hundred kilometers at a time. Now powering this impressive suite of cameras, drills, spectrometers, high gain antennas, and rotors would be a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or what we also call an MMRTG. This uses the heat from the decay of plutonium in order to generate electricity, so that would basically make Dragonfly a nuclear-powered rotorcraft flying in the atmosphere of a moon going around an outer planet. That mission time for Dragonfly would last approximately two years, and it's basically sounding about as epic as it gets. Now both of these spacecraft have received about four million dollars in further funding to revise their designs, and then they're going to down-select to a single mission in 2019, and that mission will be cost-capped at eight hundred and fifty million dollars total for the budget, which does not include a launch vehicle or spacecraft operations. So expect that total cost to go just slightly north of about one billion dollars. So which one of these two do I want to actually end up seeing come to fruition? Well, por qué no los dos, why not both? That would be kind of nice if we could end up making that happen, like we did with the recent Discovery class missions that NASA selected this year in 2017. So thanks for watching the Spacepod, and if you enjoyed this, you should tune in at 1,800 Coordinated Universal Time on Saturdays to watch the Tomorrow Live Show, because there is nothing quite like watching it happen live in front of your very eyes. And of course, don't forget to like and subscribe to us as well here on Tomorrow. So until the next Spacepod, keep exploring.