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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."
I would seriously be interested in donating maybe a hundred dollars toward something like this, and I can't be the only one. Are there any non-profit organizations that fund similar missions?
Interestingly enough, the Cassini Orbiter's landing probe, the Huygens, which landed on Titan a few years back, was designed with floatation devices, just in case it hit liquid instead land (ultimately it hit land). An interesting fact about Titan: the high density of the atmosphere, combined with a much lower gravitational force than that of earth results in very soft probe landings. In fact, it is hypothesized that on Titan, a human could strap fake wings on his arms and fly -- now if only we breathed methane and could survive at temperatures colder than -200F...
Wikipedia has a picture showing the probe floating on Titan.
One question I can immediately see an answer to is whether the ASRG generates as much power in vacuum as it will on the surface of Titan. My assumption is that having a weaker heat sink will reduce power output but I can't confirm that.
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Where did this methane come from? The common wisdom is that terrestrial hydrocarbons come from old dead stuff. Maybe not?
This idea is beyond awesome. Sending a "ship" to sail the seas of another world. And the price... $400 million... is uber-cheap in the world of space exploration.
Unless we can send a man to a near-Earth asteroid, this is the kind of exploration NASA should be doing... not manned attempts at Mars. Not yet.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Well, conditions on the earth vary dramatically with location, even ignoring biological and biogenic variation. It seems to me that a vessel capable of performing tests over a wider area can't help but provide better data. One of the big downsides of the Mars rovers is that they're restricted to such a small portion of the planet's surface, especially since for the Titan mission this can apparently be achieved on a low budget. I mean, what reason do we have to think that the chemical composition of the ocean and atmosphere don't vary with location? What about things like currents, and winds? Maybe we'll find something that's entirely unexpected!
Maybe Star Wars was right and planets other than earth are all 'desert' planets or 'ice' planets with uniform conditions all around, but if not, this seems worthwhile!
There are a number of good reasons for doing this.
The primary objective of the mission would be to determine the precise chemistry of one of these lakes; but also to do meteorology, to help scientists better understand how the "methane-ologic cycle" on Titan actually works.
It would give scientists the opportunity to study shared climate processes at work under very different conditions.
"If we have models that will work on Earth and on Titan then we can be much more confident that those models understand the fundamentals of what's going on," explained the researcher from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
"The photogenic appeal and the mystique of exploring a sea on another world speak for themselves, but there is a genuine practical application to do with the science that will help us address problems here on Earth."
Plus it's already been under study for two years, and it would test a "novel power system," the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator.
ASRGs would give TiME sufficient energy to support a very capable instrument suite and a direct-to-Earth communications system to get its data home.
Not to mention that Titan looks like one of the best nearby candidates for life, specifically in its seas and not on its surface. Landing on Titan's shores is apt to be far less interesting than in its seas.
Your brain is not a computer.
Maybe our agencies don't want to find life yet, as some societal and religious aspects of there being life somewhere else would drive the religious folk crazy, or maybe they don't want to contaminate Europa. Whatever the reason they need to get off of their collective rear ends (asses) and do a mission there before even going back to Mars. I just get tired of the new bright and shiny and unpaid for missions, and some of the more dumb funded one that just go in circles snapping images of useless real estate, when Europa truly deserves, on all levels, a serious series of missions that bring light to what resides under the ice.
If we knew what we'd find, there would be little point in going. And why are you so sure that we shouldn't find life in a sea of methane? Sure, nothing evolved on earth would survive there, but that's the point - it wouldn't be life evolved on earth. Maybe the ammonia seas of other moons are better candidates what with amonia sharing some of the "unique" properties of water (like floating ice) but I'm not as certain as you about where life can and can't evolve, given time and space.
And then of course there's the whole "exploring for the sake of exploring" thing. To get any real data we need to land something on Titan, and the most obviously interesting places are the methane lakes. You could land on a shore but with the dense atmosphere there's probably going to be waves and it's easier to just go ahead and build a boat then to build a crawler that can also tolerate being under water.
Heh, yeah. First thing I thought of too. This better be a sailboat they're planning to use. Wait, does Titan have strong winds?
> Sail around to find more liquid methane?
Sail around and observe thousands of miles of shoreline. Study the atmosphere and seabottom at widely separated points. This ship will travel farther in a day than a Mars rover can in a month.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The story of human exploration on Earth has been one of navigation and seafaring
The story of human exploration on Earth has also been one of spreading disease and wiping out indigenous populations. Bacteria are known to survive the radiation and vacuum and cold of space quite nicely, thank you. I do not think this is a good way of looking for alien life.
Infuriate left and right
Titan is interesting because, in many ways, it is probably similar to primordial Earth, frozen in time. Even with low temperatures still the most similar place to our planet in the Solar System.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Or it could be like a Swiss cheese: round, flat, and hollow at the same time.
> But if we do run out of oil here, we'll have to get the raw materials to
> make plastics from somewhere. Titan seems as good a choice for that purpose
> as any.
Much cheaper to simply use water, air, and any handy source of carbon.
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