[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]

I agree, we should seek to avoid doing widespread damage to Titan with any probes we send, but ultimately, we can only predict so much. Certainly, I don't think we should send atomic bombs and set them off on Titan in order to 'see what happens' (though we seem to have done that many times on Earth....), but, really, who am I to say a forest fire in Africa might not ultimately be a good thing? In the short term, it seems bad, but in the long term, eh, I'm just not that psychic. Maybe somebody else is.

You can deride me for being 'too philosophical' if you like, but I fail to see how I'm wrong here.