NASA's Planetary Fleets, Including Mars, Venus, Discovery Missions, and Small Body Missions

Planetary science is a grand human enterprise that seeks to understand the history of our solar system and the distribution of life within it. Planetary science missions inform us about our neighborhood and our own origin and evolution; they are necessary precursors to the expansion of humanity beyond Earth. Through five decades of planetary exploration, NASA has developed the capac­ity to explore all of the objects in our solar system. Future missions will bring back samples from some of these desti­nations, allowing iterative detailed study and analysis back on Earth. In the future, humans will return to the Moon, go to asteroids, Mars, and ultimately other solar system bodies to explore them, but only after they have been explored and understood using robotic missions.