[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_*]

Well, the Outer Planets Assessment Group last year reached a definite conclusion that Europa Orbiter was higher-priority than a follow-up Titan mission. There are three things I can think of that might change that ranking at this point:

(1) The possibility -- and it IS only a possibility -- that we might be able to design a desirable combined Titan-Enceladus mission;

(2) Cassini's apparent discovery that water/ammonia cryovolcanism is more extensive on Titan than had been thought, which would raise the odds that landers might find complex prebiotic molecules in its surface ice (and -- as an extremely long shot which, however, really is under consideration -- that such surface cryovolcanic ice flows might contain frozen microbes from Titan's subsurface ocean);

(3) The possibility that we'll only be able to get enough funds for a New Frontiers-class mission to any of those three worlds in the next decade -- in which case we'll need to carefully compare how much could be done at each of those three worlds with an NF mission, as opposed to a Flagship-class one.