What if you had 300 million dollars to spend? Think about what you might buy with that. A new car, a new house, and you would still have a lot of change to spare. The possibilities are endless. The only problem is your chances of getting this much money are slim to none. In less of course you are a big government agency like NASA. NASA just received that much money to spend, but NASA engineers won't be receiving a pay raise with this money.
 

NASA officials were presented with 26 proposals and then picked three finalists. The first one is called the Dawn Mission. It would use two of the exact same pieces of equipment to observe two very different asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, some of the largest known asteroids in the solar system. It is believed that the properties of these two asteroids are extremely different.

Or the money may be spent on a space telescope designed to detect planets about the size of Earth in the same area of the galaxy as the sun. This mission is named the Kepler mission.

Perhaps the money will be spent on the INSIDE Jupiter mission, which stands for The Interior Structure and Internal Dynamical Evolution of Jupiter. This mission would measure processes occurring in the magnetosphere and atmosphere

So what benefits do each of these missions have? Well, the Dawn mission might help scientists figure out if the two asteroids the Vesta and Ceres are really as different as thought and if so, why. The Kepler might find about 500 earth-sized planets and about 1,000 planets the size of Jupiter. And as for INSIDE Jupiter it would help determine the internal structure of Jupiter.

So which one of these proposals will be used? NASA officials will make that decision will in about a year by NASA officials. 300 million dollarsةIs it worth it to explore space, especially after billions of dollars were lost after the Mars Pathfinder disappeared into space? That decision will have to be made by you.