Proposed Titan Paddle Boat Mission, The Titan Lake In-situ Sampling Propelled Explorer (TALISE) proposes a Options

[Phil Naranjo]

I saw this article today: The Titan Lake In-situ Sampling Propelled Explorer (TALISE) proposes a sending an instrument-laden boat-probe to Saturn’s largest moon.

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/97611/paddleb.../#ixzz27hR16wOH

I was under the impression that the liquid hydrocarbon lakes of Titan were highly viscous, more tar like? Prior to Cassini, I recall speculation by scientists that Titan might harbor giant waves.

--Phil

[vjkane]

I'll echo John Rehling's comments on Titan as a world deserving of many missions. In terms of landing, flying, or floating, it's also the easiest world to explore. On the down sides, it's distance means long flight times, plutonium power sources, and higher power communications systems, all of which means more dollars.

The ease of landing probably makes Titan cheaper to explore via a series of landers, flyers, floaters than with an orbiter (the opposite of Mars). A mission to map Titan in high resolution requires a high power communications system and a high capacity plutonium-based power system to match. Estimates come in at $1.5B up to many B's. A minimal lander mission would cost between $425M (TiME proposal team's assumed estimate) and somewhat greater than $1B (Decadal Survey estimate) for a lake lander, which represents one of the simpler missions. The AVIATR airplane mission (without a relay orbiter) was estimated to cost ~$750M. A simple relay orbiter (like that which is planned for the TALISE lake lander that started this thread) could be fairly cheap compared to a high capability orbiter, but I haven't seen estimates.

Net of all this, for much less than is proposed for NASA's Mars program, we could have a series of missions to Titan (although to be fair, the Titan craft would be less capable than the missions envisioned for Mars -- distance from Earth and the sun extracts its penalty).

TiME would have been a great mission to start a series of Titan missions. Let's hope the the TALISE proposers or another team finds the bucket of money to fly.