[X] My Assistant

[imran]

Aerobot aims for Titan

An intelligent floating robot could help to explore Saturn's moon Titan, following flight tests that prove it can survey large areas of land completely autonomously. The aerobot is even smart enough to avoid dangerous turbulence.

This summer, aerobot's team got further funding to develop a full mission proposal, which may lead to a launch in 2012.

Good news and I hope this happens but a more realistic timeframe is late next decade, more likely after an Europa mission.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

A thought: if -- as the new Langley study suggests -- a flat-out
Titan aerobot mission that would cruise along and periodically scoop up
surface samples for organic analysis is indeed prohibitively expensive at $2
to $2.5 billion, would a lower-cost mission be worthwhile consisting of a
stationary lander that touches down on one such dome -- where we're most
likely to find complex water-created organics -- combined with a small
passive balloon that drifts along providing aerial images of Titan's
surface? We clearly need much better images of its surface formations than
we're going to get from either Cassini or Huygens in order to properly
understand this place. (Relaying back images from the latter without a Titan orbiter, however, might be unworkable.)

[imran]

Here are the two Titan Mission Concepts presented at the OPAG meeting thanks to the link posted by Bruce:

Titan Vision Study 1
Titan Vision Study 2

Lunine is suggesting a self-propelled airship that would fit within the New Frontier Mission cost cap of ~$750M. This price tag I believe would leave out an orbiter. Langley is proposing a similar airship that includes an orbiter. This of course would fall under the Flagship Mission cost cap, although Langley doesn't provide an estimate on the cost except that it exceeds the $700M limit. The general consensus is to go with some sort of aerial platform, most likely an airship or blimp. The question is whether there will be a complementary orbiter, which I think is necessary because we need high resolution global coverage of Titan. They need to find a way to somehow bring the total cost down to $1.5B or less from the original $2-2.5B estimate.