[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.

[mike]

On the other hand, waste heat may eventually lead to the blooming of some lifeform never before seen on Titan.

[JRehling]

On the other hand, waste heat may eventually lead to the blooming of some lifeform never before seen on Titan.

I'm not sure what time scale of "eventually" that would be, but it's hard to imagine such an exuberant theory of biogenesis that would involve timescales overlapping with how long a probe would stay warm and spatial scales so small.

I think the concern is that a warm probe would cause chemical alteration of the immediate vicinity and thereby gather data (eg, compositional measurements) atypical of Titan. A car-sized probe wouldn't have much prospect for actually altering Titan. No effects at all would show up beyond a few meters, and for more than a few decades, and it would be quite a hypothesis that new life could arise in such a small and short-lived "lab". If it were so, we could replace astrobiology interestingly with controlled experiments on Earth.

Put another way, I don't think we've seen new lifeforms arise near new and unnatural sources of heating on Earth these past few decades (say, the "eternal flame" at JFK's grave). I doubt if anyone would even think to check. And a probe wouldn't stay warm a lot longer than that. Moreover, it wouldn't be as much warmer than Titan's ambient conditions than fire is warmer than Arlington Cemetary's natural conditions.