[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?

[dvandorn]

In re landing somewhere that you expect precipitation, I rather thought that the most likely precipitation seasons are winters at the poles -- places where there will be no light, and thus no possibility of pictures. (I don't care if all you get are pictures of a glass-smooth lake surface and the sky, imagery has proven over and over again to be extremely useful, even in places where you would never expect it to be. I won't be happy with a Titan lander, no matter where it's targeted, that has no ability to return images.)

Also, the boat will be an *awful* lot warmer than the boiling point of the liquid in which it's supposed to float. This isn't water, guys, and we're talking about landing a boat that runs on the waste heat from plutonium decay. Just how, exactly, do the designers propose to vent the heat from the probe in such a way that it doesn't transfer *any* of that heat into the liquid? We won't get information on anything like the liquid's natural state if our boat's major impact on its surroundings is to boil away the liquid in which it floats...

-the other Doug