From top to bottom (not to scale) the Moon, Venus and an asteroid

Pictured from top to bottom (not to scale) are the Moon, Venus and an asteroid. These three bodies are prime candidates for NASA's next scientific space mission. The proposed missions are: monitoring Venus' atmosphere and crust, returning samples from a near-Earth asteroid for analysis, or dropping a robotic vehicle into the Moon's south polar basin and returning rock samples from there for examination and analysis on Earth .