科技英语新闻：美国国家航空和宇宙航行局的下一个目标：火星，土卫六或彗星？

You can think of NASA's Discovery program as a sort of outer-space American Idol: every few years the agency invites scientists to propose unmanned planetary missions. The projects have to address some sort of fundamental science question, and (this is the tough part) they have to be relatively cheap to pull off — say, half a billion dollars or so. Then the proposals go through a grueling competition before judges who aren't as nasty as Simon Cowell but who are every bit as tough. The one left standing at the end gets the equivalent of a recording contract: NASA supplies the funding and the launch vehicle, and away the winner goes — to orbit Mercury, as the Messenger spacecraft is doing right now; or to rendezvous with a couple of asteroids, as the Dawn mission will start doing this July; or to smash into a comet on purpose, a feat achieved by Deep Impact in 2005, a mission not to be confused with the movie of the same name.

Now it's time for the next contenders. NASA has just announced that the first round of the latest Discovery competition is over, with three entries out of 28 moving on to the finals. They are, in increasing distance from Earth: the Geophysical Monitoring Station (GEMS) lander, which would use seismometers to study the interior of Mars; the Comet Hopper, which would do just that, leaping from place to place across the surface of Comet 46P/Wirtanen to see how different parts of the tumbling body react to heating by the sun; and the Titan Mare Explorer (TiME), which would plop into a sea of liquid hydrocarbons on Saturn's moon Titan — the first oceangoing vessel ever to set sail on another world.

If you had to come up with a theme that ties all three missions together, it would be "origins." The Titan explorer, for example, will be studying a place that — in a crude way, at least — resembles the early planet Earth at a time when life arose here. Titan, with a thick atmosphere and a bizarro-world form of weather featuring toxic winds and hydrocarbon rain, is home to a mix of complex chemistry, complete with organic molecules. The oceans provide a medium in which the molecules can move around and interact with each other. It's even conceivable, though clearly a long shot, that some form of microscopic life already exists on this frigid moon.

The Mars lander, by contrast, would visit a place where the seas — plain water in this case — vanished long ago. But the mission of GEMS goes far deeper than that. By analyzing Marsquakes on the Red Planet, GEMS will try to get a handle on what the interior of Mars is like. Scientists don't currently know whether the planet's core is liquid, like Earth's, or solid, or some mushy consistency in between. It all depends on how efficiently Mars has cooled since it formed 4.5 billion years ago, and that depends in turn on the planet's internal structure.

"That's the mission," says Bruce Banerdt, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lead scientist for GEMS. "We want to understand how Mars was built." Along with sensitive seismographic equipment, GEMS will drill down about 20 ft. (6 m) with a thermometer-equipped probe, trying to figure out how quickly the temperature rises with depth. "That will let us extrapolate all the way down to the center," Banerdt says, "which will tell us how fast Mars is cooling."