Selection of Discovery Mission 13 and 14

Each finalist received $3 million to develop their mission proposals, with the NEOCam concept winning additional year in funding from NASA at the end of the competition.

The 12th mission, InSight, was delayed from its initial March 2016 launch date, following failed attempts to contain leaks in one of the spacecraft's main instruments, during numerous vacuum tests.

The United States Congress approved of a $75 million increase in the budget for the Discovery program from the Obama Administration's original FY14 request, as with other divisions and projects at NASA.

[21] Officials from NASA's Science Mission Directorate, however, stated in January 2014 that this deadline would not be met, and that it would possibly be delayed by several months.

James "Jim" Green, Director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, noted in a press conference that "they gave us the date of May 1st, and that's not realistic," stating that the deadline was not feasible in context of the declining budget allocated for the Discovery program over the past decade.

[21] The draft AO, which included potential financial incentives for technologies that would eventually make it into the final AO for Discovery Mission 13, such as the Heat Shield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) and the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC)[19] The device will be able to increase spacecraft communications performance and efficiency by 10 to 100 times over conventional means.

[33] A number of proposals targeting minor planets were also unveiled by their respective teams through briefings held at the NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group's three-hour meeting on June 30, 2015.

[27] During the meeting, three more contractors were revealed as supporting numerous entrants in the competition – Ball Aerospace, Boeing Defense, Space & Security, and Orbital ATK.

Contemporary public and media interest in Venus had escalated after the successful second orbital insertion attempt of Akatsuki in December 2015,[40][41][42] and its subsequent early data returns from the planet through the year afterward.

[43][44] Both VERITAS and DAVINCI were featured prominently in the media during this time, through recent discoveries concerning volcanism on the planet,[45] and a frigid cold layer in Venus atmosphere;[46] both subjects of interest to each respective mission.

[48][49][50] The press conference convened to publicly reveal the winner of the competition on January 4, 2017 was announced the day earlier,[51][52] after two delays from original selection dates in September and December 2016.

[56] Jim Green stated that the selection of the missions were a part of NASA's "larger strategy of investigating how the Solar System formed and evolved", describing asteroids and minor planets as the "additional pieces of the puzzle [that will] help us understand how the sun and its family of planets formed, changed over time, and became places where life could develop and be sustained, and what the future may hold.

[80] The spacecraft will perform observations of each trojan asteroid's geology, surface features, compositions, masses and densities, in order to enable study on the formation and evolution of the Solar System.

[28] 16 of these proposals were notably focused on small Solar System bodies, including asteroids, comets, kuiper belt objects, and planetary moons.