Editing Discovery Program (section)

==History==
In 1989, NASA's Solar System Exploration Division began to define a new strategy for Solar System exploration up to the year 2000. This included a Small Mission Program Group that investigated missions that would be low cost and allow focused scientific questions to be addressed in shorter time than existing programs. The result was a request for rapid studies of potential missions and NASA committed funding in 1990. The new program was called "Discovery".<ref name="History">{{cite news |title=A Look Back at the Beginning: How the Discovery Program Came to Be |year=2010 |url=http://discovery.nasa.gov/lib/pdf/HistoricalDiscoveryProgramInformation.pdf |publisher=NASA |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110301135255/http://discovery.nasa.gov/lib/pdf/HistoricalDiscoveryProgramInformation.pdf |archive-date=March 1, 2011 |url-status=dead  }}</ref>

The panel assessed several concepts that could be implemented as low-cost programs, selecting [[NEAR Shoemaker]] which became the first launch in the Discovery Program on February 17, 1996. The second mission, [[Mars Pathfinder]], launched on December 4, 1996, carried the [[Sojourner rover|''Sojourner'' rover]] to Mars.<ref name="History" />