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."

Comments

Re:What about the Asteroid Belt?

[u38cg]

There are two problems with this. (1) Space is pretty big and something big enough to hurt us is relatively small. We're unlikely to spot it until it's too late to do anything but rape the nearest moderately attractive person. (2) What are you going to do about it anyway? We have exactly zero realistic options for dealing with something like this other than raping the nearest moderately attractive person.