Proposed NASA Mission Would Sail the Seas of Titan

The BBC has a report on a proposal that will be submitted to NASA for funding — a mission to Saturn's moon Titan that would deposit a lander on its hydrocarbon sea. (We recently discussed the widely-circulated photo of sunlight glinting off one of Titan's seas.) "The scientific team behind the idea is targeting Ligeia Mare, a vast body of liquid methane sited in the high north of Saturn's largest moon. ... 'It is something that would really capture the imagination,' said Dr Ellen Stofan, from Proxemy Research, who leads the study team. 'The story of human exploration on Earth has been one of navigation and seafaring, and the idea that we could explore for the first time an extraterrestrial sea I think would be mind-blowing for most people,' she told BBC News. ... The Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) has already been under study for about two years. It is envisaged as a relatively low-cost endeavor — in the low $400m range. It could launch in January 2016, and make some flybys of Earth and Jupiter to pick up the gravitational energy it would need to head straight at the Saturnian moon for a splash down in June 2023."

Re:Odds of finding alien life?

[Ash Vince]

Come to think of it, whatever happened to that Europa lander they were planning which was supposed to bore through the ice?

As soon as you do this you risk contaminating what is underneath so you have to do this incredibly carefully. Last I heard it was on hold until they had figured out how to do it such a way that they did not introduce any contaminants in the process. They are looking to use a lake under the south pole for practice:

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-driller-02b.html [spacedaily.com]
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/earth_sciences/report-11000.html [innovations-report.com]

Re:Sailing the myriad seas?

[Lord Pillage]

Unfortunately both of those incidents require oxygen to occur. Tough luck there's not much of that on Titan.

Re:Are any non-profits doing anything like this?

[Darkness404]

The problem is, even the best commercial spacecraft can't even go to the moon, let alone further. The best thing that could be done is donating money to a college or university that develops the technology that is used by NASA or the ESA that would allow them to do it. Any money put into non profits would quickly go to waste, theres just no way you can send something to Titan without governmental assistance.

Re:Sailing the myriad seas?

[Sanat]

I did know that actually, but thanks for sharing it in more detail.

It was just my pathetic attempt at being silly.

Re:Odds of finding alien life?

[apostrophesemicolon]

The Europa lander did go up there, landed and took some video for a few second until some kind of mecha broke it. And that's the last we heard from it.

Care to buy my ancestor's glasses?

Re:Sailing the myriad seas?

[Sir_Lewk]

Wow, you clearly are not a rocket scientist are you? Rockets always carry their own oxidizers. How do you think we landed on the moon, that place doesn't even have an atmosphere.

Re:Sailing the myriad seas? No

[asaz989]

Have you ever been in a boat? If the wind only blows one way, you tack against it (if you want to go close to directly opposite wind direction - slow but it does work) or just set your sails right to get propelled whichever way you want to go roughly perpendicular to wind direction. Or you can always run with the wind if you'd actually like to go wherever the wind blows. Really, sailing on the seas of Titan with a constant wind direction would be damned easy. If there are storms, on the other hand... but (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) I don't think we've seen any big ones in our studies of the atmosphere.

Re:Sailing the myriad seas?

[mangu]

Oxygen leaking out near nozzles or methane/other hydrocarbons leaking IN could be just as bad

No worse than oxygen leaking in or methane leaking out of a natural gas powered car on earth.

Re:Europa or bust -- Titan sucks..

[Trapezium Artist]

Err, that is exactly where the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM) currently under study by ESA and NASA is suppose to go, as the name suggests.

Yes, it's more expensive than TiME and will, in principle, take longer to develop, because it's bigger and more ambitious than TiME, but it's much further along in terms of studying its technical feasibility, and so (IMHO) has a better chance of happening before TiME does. Plus, NASA is not exactly swilling in cash at the moment and if EJSM is chosen for implementation, it'd be a struggle to do TiME as well.

More details at:
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=42291 [esa.int]
http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/europajupitersystemmissionejsm/ [nasa.gov]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Jupiter_System_Mission [wikipedia.org]

TiME does sound like a very exciting concept, but I too am worried about how they intend to get data back to Earth without an orbiter relay: the numbers don't immediately stack up for an omnidirectional broadcaster from the surface of Titan, as the power available is essentially the same as Huygens had (just much longer-lived) and there's no way we can count on Cassini to be working by then to act as a relay.