NASA has selected nine research teams from seven states for a new institute that will bring researchers together in a collaborative virtual setting to focus on questions concerning space science and human space exploration.

The teams participating in the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) will address scientific questions about the moon, near-Earth asteroids, the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, and their near space environments, in cooperation with international partners.

"We look forward to collaborative scientific discoveries from these teams," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "These results will be vital to NASA successfully conducting the ambitious activities of exploring the solar system with robots and humans."

Based and managed at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., the institute will support scientific research and complement and extend existing NASA science programs. SSERVI represents an expansion of NASA's Lunar Science Institute, established at Ames in 2008, to include other solar system destinations.

"SSERVI continues to strengthen the collaboration between exploration and science as we explore the solar system together," said Jason Crusan, director of the Advanced Exploration Systems Division in NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate in Washington.

SSERVI members include academic institutions, non-profit research institutes, private companies, NASA centers and other government laboratories. The winning teams, which SSERVI will support for five years at a combined total of about $12 million per year, were selected from a pool of 32 proposals based on competitive peer-review evaluation.

The selected SSERVI member teams, listed with their research topics and principal investigators, are:

- Institute for the Science of Exploration Targets: Origin, Evolution and Discovery; William Bottke, Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

- Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science; Daniel Britt, University of Central Florida in Orlando, Fla.

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NASA Selects Research Teams for New Virtual Institute