[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Researcher Touts Saturn’s Titan As New Exploration Goal
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer, Space.com
posted: 14 March 2006
01:07 pm ET


"'Titan is just waiting for us…Titan wants us,' [Jonathan] Lunine suggested. 'There is no body in the outer solar system that is better designed for exploration than Titan.'"

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Your memory is, unfortunately, in error enough to be irrelevant on this. The very first plan for Cassini -- back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the US was considering flying it alone -- differed from the current version only in also carrying a Saturn entry probe, which (like the Galileo entry probe) would have been dropped off just prior to Saturn orbital insertion. In fact, the mission was called "Saturn Orbiter with Two Probes" (SO2P), and I have a detailed record of a planning workshop for it that occurred all the way back in 1979, before ANY spacecraft visits to Saturn. By the time the US got around to designing it in Mariner Mark 2 form, the Saturn entry probe had already been removed for cost reasons, and the Titan probe had been handed over to the ESA.