[X] My Assistant

[Mark6]

Today I heard this on NPR: Exploring a moon by boat

The mission could launch around 2016 and be sailing on Titan around 2022 — if this team gets through a highly competitive selection process to get funding from NASA. Stofan and her colleagues are busy working up their proposal for when NASA begins to accept ideas for future Discovery-class missions.

Quick Google search on Dr. Stofan's name found this: What Next for Titan?

Ellen Stofan has a Discovery-class Titan lake lander proposal. I've not seen the presentation, but a friend who has tells me that it is less capable than the ESA lake lander proposed for TSSM. (This would make sense – ESA had a budget of ~$1B for just the lake lander and balloon. Stofan has just $450M and has to fit a carrier craft and launch vehicle into that budget.) The 2007 report did not look at lake landers. I know of Stofan by reputation, and she's highly competent. However, fitting in a carrier, lander (with entry shell), and launch vehicle within a Discovery mission budget seems ambitious. Perhaps this could be done with a New Frontiers budget ($650M with the launch vehicle provided by NASA outside this budget), although the 2007 budget suggested that a budget twice this amount would be needed just for an atmopheric probe.

Aside from above quote's understandable skepticism of the Discovery-class price tag, where would plutonium for this mission come from? I thought it is all already allocated?

[stevesliva]

I'm skeptical that if one were to choose to send just one more lander to Titan, that a lake would be the clear place to choose to send it. Is there focus in this proposal of that specific choice? (Land vs. Mare?) It seems to me that if you could predict the weather, you'd almost want it on a solid piece of ground that will see some precipitation. That might be a pipe dream, but it sounds like the "boat" is going to be a meteorology package plus surface characterization tools. Do we have more questions about what's in a lake, or more questions about what makes any other terrain on Titan? I suppose you do learn for certain what part of the aquifer is composed of... and that answers a global question. But as for surface photos, as pointed out in later posts on the same blog, there might not be too much to see. A descent imager would be of great use, but a pancam wouldn't. If you could try to get the boat to drift to shore, though... that would be neat. Maybe give any mast more of a cross-section to the wind and less in the lake to ensure that it does drift.