Proposals for new space explorations involving four Lancaster graduates have reached the final stage of NASA’s competition to find missions to become part of the next Discovery Programme.

The US Space Agency, NASA, has announced four successful proposals in its competition to find the most “exciting planetary science missions that deepen what we know about the solar system and our place in it.” Three of the successful proposals, including flights to Venus and to the moons of Neptune and Jupiter, involve space scientists who have studied or researched at Lancaster University. Each mission will now get $3 million to develop their concept further, with up to two of them being chosen next year to become part of NASA’s 9^th Discovery Programme.

Dr Louise Prockter, who graduated from Lancaster with a BSc Hons. in Environmental Science in 1994, is now Director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston Texas. She is principal investigator of the proposed Trident mission, which aims to help us understand how habitable worlds develop. It plans a flight to explore Triton, a unique and highly volcanically active icy moon of Neptune, which has the second youngest surface in the solar system. A Co-Investigator on this mission is Dr Karl Mitchell, Staff Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California, who got his PhD from Lancaster in 2002.

Dr Ashley Davies, also a staff scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who got his PhD from Lancaster University (1988), is a co-investigator on the Io Volcano Observer (IVO) mission. If successful, IVO will involve flying close by Io, one of Jupiter’s moons and the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The mission could revolutionise our understanding of the formation and evolution of rocky, terrestrial bodies and of icy ocean worlds in our solar system and beyond.

Dr Lori Glaze, who got her PhD at Lancaster in 1994, is involved in the Da Vinci+ proposal, which would be the first space mission to Venus since 1978. Da Vinci+ aims to analyse the inhospitable atmosphere of Venus to understand how it formed and evolved and to determine whether Venus ever had an ocean. Lori was originally the principal investigator on the project but recently stepped down when she was appointed Director of the Planetary Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. She is still involved as a co-investigator.

Emeritus Professor Lionel Wilson, from the Lancaster Environment Centre, taught or supervised all the successful Lancaster graduates. Lionel pioneered our understanding of the physics of volcanic eruptions through examining data from space missions throughout the solar system.

He said: "It is so satisfying to see that people whose interest in planetary science was nurtured here at Lancaster over the last 50 years are making these great contributions to the exploration of the Solar System".

The only disappointment for Lionel is that Moon Diver, the proposed mission on which he is a co-investigator, was not one of the four chosen for further immediate development. Moon Diver planned to enable a small robot to abseil down into a deep pit extending through some of the Moon's many lava flows, making measurements on the way. The team plan to resubmit the project for a future proposal round.