I'd be pretty enthusiastic about any of those... except the Saturn Probe. Seven years of travel for 55 minutes of data collection, taking up an entire New Frontiers slot doesn't seem like a very good trade. Granted we've never explored Saturn's atmosphere, but it seems like the sort of thing that ought to be piggybacked on another mission rather than butting out all the other missions on this list which look to me to have a much higher overall volume of science return than the probe.
Just for my clarification is that an orbiter that will only visit Enceladus & Titan. If so what will it offer over what we have already obtained science wise from Cassini?
Quote from: Star One on 01/07/2016 08:44 pmJust for my clarification is that an orbiter that will only visit Enceladus & Titan. If so what will it offer over what we have already obtained science wise from Cassini?Far, far better instruments.
Quote from: vjkane on 01/07/2016 09:19 pmQuote from: Star One on 01/07/2016 08:44 pmJust for my clarification is that an orbiter that will only visit Enceladus & Titan. If so what will it offer over what we have already obtained science wise from Cassini?Far, far better instruments....and they would be specifically targeted based on what we've learned from Cassini. Before Cassini we had no idea Enceladus even had plumes or an ocean.
Would they include the capacity to sample plumes?
Except that Discovery proposals are open-ended. The proposer is not trying to design a mission to answer a given set of scientific questions, they are choosing the questions themselves. Just because somebody has proposed a Discovery mission to one of these bodies in the past does not mean that their scientific goals are ones that the rest of the scientific community believes are worthwhile.
Quote from: NovaSilisko on 01/07/2016 06:35 pmI'd be pretty enthusiastic about any of those... except the Saturn Probe. Seven years of travel for 55 minutes of data collection, taking up an entire New Frontiers slot doesn't seem like a very good trade. Granted we've never explored Saturn's atmosphere, but it seems like the sort of thing that ought to be piggybacked on another mission rather than butting out all the other missions on this list which look to me to have a much higher overall volume of science return than the probe.The Saturn Probe advocates managed to convince the decadal survey that the science was highly valuable.
Quote from: Star One on 01/07/2016 08:44 pmJust for my clarification is that an orbiter that will only visit Enceladus & Titan. If so what will it offer over what we have already obtained science wise from Cassini?And that is the billion dollar question.The mission concepts in the decadal survey are relatively well defined in terms of science goals and objectives. You'll note that there were no Enceladus or Titan New Frontiers mission options in the DS...So, what would an Enceladus or Titan mission be? A Titan airplane? A Titan balloon? A Titan lake lander/boat? How about Enceladus? Would it be a sample return mission? Would it be an orbiter? A lander? Or something else? And how, exactly, will a review team evaluate the scientific value of such a mission considering that it is not defined in the Decadal Survey? Is a Titan airplane a "better" mission scientifically than a Titan boat? How do you rate it? Who says one is better? It's so open-ended that it's really hard to figure out what the criteria would be.
I see what you mean. At first thought I'd opt for something like a Titan boat dropped off by an Enceladus orbiter. Planetary protection wise it's probably easier & cheaper to put something on the surface of Titan than it would be Enceladus.
As far as the missions for the Saturn system, something like a dual-probe arrangement with a Saturn probe and a Titan balloon/lander could be interesting. The Saturn probe would be short-term (yet legitimately valuable mission) while the Titan probe (in whatever form it could take) would be a long-term arrangement. The only disadvantage with both is they'd need to communicate directly with Earth - difficult but not impossible. I don't see the Saturn probe flying that whole distance by itself (as a mission), simply because the Saturnian system is too valuable to reduce to a mere hour-long expedition.
It's worth noting that the Lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin Sample Return and Venus In-Situ Explorer missions were finalists for NF3. The feedback they received then will make any proposal from the same people this time stronger.Remember what the Juno team had to do & how many times OSIRIS-REX was iterated before they were selected. Titan and Enceladus have a lot of 'wow' factor, but any mission proposal is going to have to be really solid to get chosen their first time out.