A living creature in Mars? Or the discovery of a new planet perhaps?

We will find out with the new missions to study the Earth, the sun, the Milky Way and Earth-like planets being undertaken in the future.

NASA has announced the selection of 11 science proposals for evaluation as potential science missions. These proposals were chosen from the submissions to NASA's Announcements of Opportunity for Explorer Mission and Explorer Missions of Opportunity released in November last year.

The five Explorer Missions which will receive $1 million each for an 11-month mission concept while the five Explorer Mission of Opportunity proposals. The costs of these explorer missions are capped at $200 million each, with the launch vehicle excluded. NASA also chose one explorer mission for technology development which will receive $600,000.

Meanwhile, five Mission of Opportunity proposals were selected from 20 that were submitted which will receive $250,000 each to conduct an 11-month implementation concept study with the mission cost capped at $55 million each.

After the submission of the detailed mission concept studies, NASA will choose up to two Explorer Mission proposals and one or more Mission of Opportunity proposals by 2013 which would proceed toward flight and launch by 2016.

The five Explorer Mission proposals chosen by NASA are:

The Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) which involves the flying of instruments to determine the extreme variability of the Earth's ionosphere which can cause interference with communications and geopositioning signals.

Another proposal, the Fast INfrared Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey Explorer (FINESSE), will be the first mission aimed at discovering the composition of exoplanet atmospheres, what conditions or processes cause their composition and how the solar system fits into the larger family of planets, using a space telescope.

The Observatory for Heteroscale Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling (OHMIC) mission involves the use a pair of spacecraft that will fly in formation to study the processes that provide energy to power space weather storms, which can create auroras and other electromagnetic activity that may have an effect on orbiting spacecraft operations.

Using special telescopes, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is aimed at identifying terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. The conduct of all-sky survey will be done to discover transiting exoplanets in orbit around the nearest stars.

The fifth explorer mission chosen by NASA is the Atmosphere-Space Transition Region Explorer (ASTRE) that will study the interaction between the Earth's atmosphere and the ionized gases of space.

NASA's Explorer program is designed to provide access to space using PI-led space science investigations related to its astrophysics and heliophysics programs. Started in 1958 with the Explorer 1 launch, the Explorer program has since then launched 90 missions.