The Flagship Program is a series of NASA missions to explore the Solar System. It is the largest and most expensive of three classes of NASA Solar System Programs – the other two being the Discovery Program, which is the cheapest in cost, and the New Frontiers Program, which is medium-cost.
According to NASA, the cost of Flagship Program missions ranges between $2 billion and $3 billion. These missions will be crucial in allowing humans to reach and explore difficult, but high-priority targets. These critically important targets could help establish the limits of habitability, not just for our Solar system, but for planetary systems in general. In particular, they potentially provide an opportunity to identify pre-biotic organic molecules or even extant life beyond Earth, should it exist, in our own Solar System. The targets of Flagship Missions may include complex missions to the clouds and surface of Venus; the lower atmosphere and surface of Titan; the surface and subsurface of Europa; the deep atmosphere of Neptune and the surface of its moon Triton; and the surface of a comet nucleus in the form of cryogenically preserved samples.[1]
The flagship program includes the Mars Science Laboratory, the Cassini spacecraft, the Galileo spacecraft, and the Voyager probes. The Voyager probes mark the transition between the original NASA unmanned mission programs, which were funded and organized as a series of related missions to specific targets such as the Mariner probes, Viking landers, Pioneer probes, Surveyor landers, Ranger satellites, etc and the modern NASA program which includes flagships. In the early 1990s, NASA made the decision that instead of a centrally planned mission approach around pre-selected targets, mission ideas would be competed. The competitions would be based in cost categories, eventually turning into the Discovery, New Frontiers, and Flagship program. While teams self-assemble to compete for Discovery and New Frontiers missions, Flagship programs are still strongly influenced by NASA headquarters. Also, Discovery and New Frontiers missions are scheduled frequently enough that a standard process has emerged and scientists can expect that process to be followed, but Flagship programs seem to follow a different organizational and development approach every time.
The next Flagship Program mission is a Mars Sample Return Mission according to the Planetary Decadal Survey.
A joint NASA/ESA mission to the Jupiter system, tentatively called the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM), is due to launch no earlier than 2020. According to NASA, the goals of the mission are for two robotic orbiters working together to determine whether the Jovian system harbors habitable worlds. The orbiters would perform extensive study of the Jovian system before finally focusing on the intriguing moons Europa and Ganymede. The spacecraft—NASA's Jupiter Europa Orbiter and the European Space Agency's Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter—would determine the extent of subsurface oceans and ice shells on the targeted moons. The moon studies placed in the context of the Jovian system would allow for comparative planetology and would provide significant insight into the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants.[2]
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