NASA's Discovery Program is a series of lower-cost, highly focused scientific space missions. It was founded to implement NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin's vision of "faster, better, cheaper" planetary missions.

Successfully completed missions:

• NEAR Shoemaker, a mission to study asteroids, succeeded in its goals and is now defunct, having successfully landed on 433 Eros.
• Mars Pathfinder, a Mars lander with a miniature rover, completed its mission and is now defunct.
• Lunar Prospector, a Moon orbiter, achieved its objectives and was deliberately crashed onto the Moon's surface.
• Deep Impact, a mission in which a spacecraft was deliberately impacted into a comet, still has a functional flyby craft which may be used for an extended mission.
• Stardust, a mission to a collect samples from a comet's tail, has successfully collected its samples, returned its samples to Earth on January 15, 2006. The mother ship remains in orbit around the Sun and could be used for an extended mission.

Partially successful missions:

• Genesis, a mission to collect solar wind particles, successfully did so, but the return capsule's parachute failed to deploy and the capsule crashed into the Utah desert; preliminary reports suggest that some of the samples survived the impact and that a good deal of scientific data may still be learned from them.

More on [ Discovery Program ]

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