AVIATR - Titan Airplane Mission Concept, Proposed unmanned aerial exploration of Titan Options

[Juramike]

The AVIATR mission concept is an unmanned aerial vehicle that would fly over Titan’s surface. It’s nominal one year mission would enable detailed high-resolution images of Titan’s diverse landscapes for better comparison to Earth’s geological processes. Selected regions could be imaged at resolutions near 30 cm/pixel, equivalent to current HiRise imaging of Mars. In addition, atmospheric sampling would allow a profile of Titan’s thick lower atmosphere and how it relates to Earth’s atmospheric processes and weather systems.

Further details of the AVIATR mission concept were presented at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference 2010 and at Titan Through Time 2010.
See: Barnes et al. LPSC 41 (2010) Abstract 2551. “AVIATR: Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance.”
Freely available here: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/2551.pdf

And also: http://www.info.uidaho.edu/documents/2010%...18467&doc=1

[Mongo]

I wonder if, instead of a virtually financially impossible Titan Flagship Mission, it would be possible to have a series of lower-cost Discovery-class missions to Titan, spread over a span of years? I assume that this would be possible only if launch costs drop by an order of magnitude or more, which could happen if Elon Musk is correct about having his Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles be totally or mostly reusable.

If we have launch costs be a fairly small fraction of the total program costs, then would it be feasible to have a payload launched to Titan every launch opportunity, with the first being for example an orbiter / relay station with Radar and IR imagers / spectrometers, the second being a TiME lake floater (transmitting via the orbiter for much higher data rates), the third being an AVIATR aircraft (again, transmitting to Earth via the orbiter), etc.? Similar, in other words, to the recent Mars exploration program.

How would the costs compare to a Titan Flagship mission, and how would the science results compare? Is this a foolish notion, or does it have real possibilities?

[vjkane]

I wonder if, instead of a virtually financially impossible Titan Flagship Mission, it would be possible to have a series of lower-cost Discovery-class missions to Titan, spread over a span of years?

I provided my thoughts on this question here.