Watch the astronauts give a tour of their new Crew Dragon spacecraft

Space missions dispatched into the solar system often have journeys lasting years before reaching a scientific payoff, but NASA’s Parker Solar Probe launched last weekend on a speedy departure from planet Earth is already getting ready to sweep closer to the sun than any spacecraft in history during a flyby later this year.

NASA announced Thursday it will fund four concept studies for potential robotic missions to Venus, Jupiter’s moon Io and Neptune’s moon Triton ahead of a decision next year to approve up to two of the projects for launch in the mid-to-late 2020s.

SpaceX’s third Falcon Heavy rocket took off from the Kennedy Space Center in a predawn launch Tuesday, delivering two dozen research and weather observation spacecraft into orbit on a marathon three-and-a-half mission for the U.S. Air Force. The mission included the successful landing of the Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters back at Cape Canaveral, and a SpaceX recovery boat netted part of the rocket’s payload fairing for the first time.