Discovery Program

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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.

Failed missions:

CONTOUR, a mission to visit several comets, exploded shortly after its launch.

Missions in progress:

MESSENGER, a mission to Mercury, was launched in August 2004, and is on its way to the planet via a circuitous route.
ASPERA-3 is a 'Discovery Mission of Opportunity' (a NASA-designed instrument on board another space agency's spacecraft). It is designed to study the interaction between the solar wind and the atmosphere of Mars, and is on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter.

Forthcoming missions:

The Kepler Space Observatory, scheduled for launch in 2008, will use a unique spaceborne telescope specifically designed to search for Earth-like planets around stars beyond our solar system.
The Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) is a 'Discovery Mission of Opportunity' (a NASA-designed instrument on board another space agency's spacecraft). It is designed to explore the moon's mineral composition at high resolution, and is on board the ISRO's Chandrayaan orbiter.
Dawn, scheduled for launch in 2007, will study the large asteroids Ceres and Vesta.