NASA to choose between final two for 2025 New Frontier mission
Nasa has revealed the two finalists for its New Frontiers competition. Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return aims to explore a comet previously studied by the Rosetta mission and return a sample to Earth by 2038. Dragonfly is a project to use a drone to explore the varied terrains of Saturn's biggest moon, Titan. Both teams will be funded to the tune of $4m to develop their schemes, while Nasa will reveal the outright winner in 2019, with the mission launch planned for 2025.

Would you like NASA to fly a drone across Saturn’s largest moon, or to send a probe to collect samples from a duck-shaped comet?

From a dozen proposals to the agency’s New Frontiers competition — not unlike an interplanetary “Shark Tank” for a forthcoming robotic mission — NASA announced these two finalists on Wednesday.

“It’s one of the most difficult programs to be selected for,” said James L. Green, director of the planetary science division at NASA. “We fly only about two of these types of missions per decade.”

In the first proposed mission, Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return, or Caesar, a spacecraft would go to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, previously explored by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, and bring back a small chunk to Earth for closer study.