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Titan Balloon Mission Being Drafted
eldavojohn writes "After Huygens & Cassini corrected our assumptions about Titan (a moon of Saturn), scientists are now debating about their next mission, and one of the choices is the Titan and Saturn System Mission. What makes Titan a good choice? 'Although the atmosphere of Titan is filled with a smoggy orange hydrocarbon haze, it is primarily composed of nitrogen — just like Earth's. In fact, Astrobiologists think Titan's atmosphere may be quite similar to how the Earth's was billions of years ago, before life on our planet generated oxygen.' We also discussed its liquid hydrocarbons earlier this year."
Asteroid belt objects are unlikely to hit the Earth during the course of the human race's existence. They're in fairly stable, roughly circular orbits that don't cross Earth's orbit. You're more worried about NON-Belt asteroids and, perhaps more so, comets.
In any case, it isn't a zero-sum game: funding Titan research doesn't mean that asteroids don't get studied.
Meanwhile, we *do* have projects to catalog all such asteroids *and* a mission to the asteroid belt in play right now. So what's your complaint?