Is there much likelihood of a Titan mission any time soon?
I would love to see a rover on both Titan and Enceladus. Too bad we can't do a three or four part probe to Titan. One; a ground Rover, Two: a submersible/surface probe for the "lakes", Three; an airborne aircraft or warm "air" balloon probe, Fourth; a lander that could not only do deep geological and chemical research, but also act as a potential communications relay for the other probes. This would allow them to use lower powered transmitters to the main lander to preserve power, or to direct transmit, should something happen to the "Home base" lander.
Yes, a Saturn orbiter called E2T, but it would only sample the top of the Titanean atmosphere and of course it's going to be in a very tough competition. An Ocean Worlds New Frontiers is probably more likely to happen.
Quote from: JasonAW3 on 07/07/2016 08:34 pmI would love to see a rover on both Titan and Enceladus. Too bad we can't do a three or four part probe to Titan. One; a ground Rover, Two: a submersible/surface probe for the "lakes", Three; an airborne aircraft or warm "air" balloon probe, Fourth; a lander that could not only do deep geological and chemical research, but also act as a potential communications relay for the other probes. This would allow them to use lower powered transmitters to the main lander to preserve power, or to direct transmit, should something happen to the "Home base" lander.That would be great, but it's probably too ambitious for anything other than a Flagship mission.My own choice would be a two-part mission like the old Viking missions -- an orbiter equipped with a tomographic imaging radar, similar to the Magellan mission to Venus, and a lander of some sort. The orbiter would double as a communications relay to Earth. The lander would include an airborne probe of some kind for distance travel, and a floating surface probe to be dropped off when the airborne portion is passing over a sea.
Would having the probe being able to move around on the seas add greatly to the costs?
Quote from: Star One on 07/10/2016 07:20 pmWould having the probe being able to move around on the seas add greatly to the costs?Yes. Unless you're talking about a sail. But any kind of active propulsion is completely new and unproven and therefore expensive.I'm also not sure what propulsion actually gives you. It's going to move from wind anyway. If you theoretically want to have a propulsion system that could enable it to hover over a feature on the bottom, that's actually a pretty complex system because it would have to work autonomously. How would it know that it was staying in one place and not moving? On Earth, we do that with ships via GPS systems. But if you spotted something interesting on the bottom using sonar, by the time you got the data back to Earth and you decided it was interesting enough to focus on, the boat would have moved from wind or currents. There would be no way to send a command telling it to "go back to that interesting thing that you saw yesterday." How would it navigate back there? Seems like there just would not be much of a point and there would be a lot of cost.
Thanks for that information. So something simple like a sail could be included without too much extra cost then.
Quote from: Mongo62 on 07/10/2016 06:32 pmQuote from: JasonAW3 on 07/07/2016 08:34 pmI would love to see a rover on both Titan and Enceladus. Too bad we can't do a three or four part probe to Titan. One; a ground Rover, Two: a submersible/surface probe for the "lakes", Three; an airborne aircraft or warm "air" balloon probe, Fourth; a lander that could not only do deep geological and chemical research, but also act as a potential communications relay for the other probes. This would allow them to use lower powered transmitters to the main lander to preserve power, or to direct transmit, should something happen to the "Home base" lander.That would be great, but it's probably too ambitious for anything other than a Flagship mission.My own choice would be a two-part mission like the old Viking missions -- an orbiter equipped with a tomographic imaging radar, similar to the Magellan mission to Venus, and a lander of some sort. The orbiter would double as a communications relay to Earth. The lander would include an airborne probe of some kind for distance travel, and a floating surface probe to be dropped off when the airborne portion is passing over a sea.Would having the probe being able to move around on the seas add greatly to the costs?
One mission might collect samples of Titan's upper atmosphere and of Enceladus' geysers and of ring dust, and bring it home to Earth. The transfer vehicle could park in high (or highly eccentric) Saturn orbit, drop off a daughter vehicle that "clips" the moons and rings to collect flyby samples. When it returns to the mothership, all mass is discarded except for the samples and the return to Earth power.