A kind of X Factor in space
All roads lead to the French capital this week. If you are a European space scientist, there is just one place to be - at the .
On Tuesday, it will host a kind of X Factor for future European Space Agency (Esa) missions.
This is part of Europe's long-term planning, called , to find the next Medium- and Large-class missions, for launch in the 2015-2025 timescale.
Six teams will get an hour to present their dream project in front of an extremely knowledgeable crowd - their peers.
The prize: something like a 300m-euro budget to make that medium-sized dream come true.
The six competing concepts are:
• : A mission which will look at the Universe out to a distance of about 10 billion light-years to map the influence "dark energy" has had on cosmic evolution.
• : A cooperative mission with the Japanese that would launch a telescope to study the cosmos at infrared wavelengths.
• : A mission to find and study planets beyond our Solar System.
• : A sample-return mission to a near-Earth object. It would consist of a mother satellite which would carry a lander, sampling devices, re-entry capsule as well as instruments.
• : A swarm of 12 spacecraft (seven from Esa; five from Japan/Canada) to make simultaneous measurements of plasma (charged gas) surrounding Earth.
• : An observatory that would go to within 34 million km of our star to study activities unseen by previous probes.
There will be no immediate announcement of a winner, however. Simon Cowell will not jump up on stage at the end of the day with a big cheque.
Instead, an assessment committee will go away and look at the details before recommending which projects should be carried forward into the so-called definition phase.
This will require the remaining teams to put even more commitment into outlining how their missions would be undertaken.
Eventually, it is likely only two projects will be selected for launch, in either 2017 or 2018.
It's a long haul. Discussions on what sort of science Europe ought to be doing under the Cosmic Vision banner began in earnest in 2004.
The first major whittling down of ideas occurred in 2007. There's another two years before a winner in this competition is chosen.
It's not just a case of who will do the most compelling science; it's also a question of who has the best mission plan and the necessary (mature) technology to carry it through.
For those who get to, but fall, at the final hurdle it must be deeply frustrating having invested so much energy and time in an idea only to then get re-buffed.
And for the lucky winners, there is then the hard part of delivering on the promise; and as we have seen in recent weeks with Esa's BepiColombo Mercury mission, the path to the launch pad .
I'll report back later in the week on how the "beauty contest" went. Watch this space.
±õ’m 
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