A Mars spacecraft has now been AWOL for more than a month. But NASA hasn't given up hope of restoring contact with the MAVEN orbiter.

Among other things, the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to get us closer to finding habitable worlds around faraway stars. From its perch a million miles from Earth, Webb’s huge gold-coated mirror collects more light than any other telescope put into space.

"Awards like these are a critical component of our incubator program for future missions, which combines government leadership with commercial innovation to make what is impossible today rapidly implementable in the future," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in the statement.

NASA's new CMEx mission will measure the Sun's chromosphere magnetism, the origin of solar storms, hoping to improve solar storm warnings.