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Like pretty much every other agency in the government, NASA is likely to be hurting for money over the next few years. The end of the Space Shuttle program, which comes with Atlantis' final flight next month, will free up some cash. But at best, NASA's budget will be flat in 2012, and given the mood in Congress, "at best" isn't something to count on. And thanks to the cost overruns plaguing the yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope, the agency's science programs are especially vulnerable to cuts.

But that's down the road. For now, things are positively hopping at the Kennedy Space Center. Last week, a brand-new Mars rover, named Curiosity, arrived at Cape Canaveral to be prepared for launch this coming November. But long before that — as early as August 5, if conditions are right — a new probe called Juno will be on its way to Jupiter, followed by the GRAIL mission in September, designed to study the Moon's gravity field in unprecedented detail.



Of the three, Curiosity is sure to make the biggest public splash. Ever since Sojourner, NASA's first Mars rover, transfixed the world as it rolled around the Red Planet during the July 4th holiday in 1997, people have gone slightly mad over these adorable, self-propelled explorers — and after Spirit and Opportunity followed in 2004, the word "plucky" became a space cliche.

All three rovers did spectacular science as well, studying the mineralogy and topography of Mars in astonishing detail, and establishing beyond a doubt that water once flowed and pooled on the planet's surface. The six-wheeled Curiosity will be about the size of a small car (think a Mini Cooper with many millions of dollars of instruments attached) compared to the golf cart-sized Spirit and Opportunity and the microwave oven-sized Sojourner. One thing Curiousity's bulk will buy it is range — far greater than that of the other rovers, partly thanks to a nuclear power source in place of solar panels. That also means that the rover won't have to slow down during the relatively dim Martian winter or worry about dust cutting down on the panels' efficiency at any time of year.

Like its smaller predecessors, Curiosity won't be just a passive observer. It's a rolling laboratory, armed with a laser that can vaporize bits of rock for analysis; a high-resolution camera that can study rocks and even bits of frost at microscopic scales; and a "sniffer" to sample the atmosphere. The ultimate goal: find out if Mars might once have harbored life — or even might harbor it today. Organic molecules embedded in rocks or soil could suggest the former. And if Curiosity's sniffer detects methane gas, it could even imply the latter, since methane can be a byproduct of living subsurface bacteria.

Those answers should start to come in August, 2012, when Curiosity starts rolling. For the Juno mission, things will take a little longer. Though it will launch this summer, the probe won't reach Jupiter until July of 2016. But once it gets there and settles into orbit, Juno will begin an intensive study of the structure and composition of the Solar System' biggest planet. Despite flybys by the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, and the long mission of the Galileo orbiter — which sent a probe plunging into Jupiter's dense, roiling atmosphere — planetary scientists still don't know a lot about how Jupiter was formed.

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