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."

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Titan Landing Probes

[ranson]

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...

Re:Titan Landing Probes

[deglr6328]

What's missing from this discussion, and so far as I can see from any proposal site discussions on this mission, is how to get the data back from the probe! If this is going to be a lander without an orbiter, you have a SERIOUS problem of how to get data back to earth. We talked about this very topic 5 years ago here after Huygens landed. People are going to want high-res images, audio and at least some video in addition to all the other basic science data from this mission. That is a HUGE amount of information to get back to earth from a billion miles out, while floating on a lake of CH4 under a thick atmosphere. The Huygens probe had 2 redundant, 8 watt, medium gain (partially directional) on board radio transmitters that sent all the data from the probe through the Cassini orbiter relay system. It took VLBI aperture synthesis, simultaneously using ~20 of some of the largest radio telescopes around the world JUST TO HEAR THE CARRIER SIGNAL of Huygens as it descended on Titan. We couldn't get any actual data directly from Huygens, we couldn't hear modulation of the signal clearly from that far away.

Huygens had a power budget from its NaS batteries of ~250W, you're not going to do much better than that with a sterling radioisotope generator for this proposed mission. So you have maybe 20W of radio power to use on this mission in order to get all your data back from Titan, you NEED to use a directional (high gain) antenna to do that. How the hell do you accurately and consistently point a high gain antenna directly at earth when rotating and bobbing around wildly while floating over the waves of a Titanian lake?!

Re:This is exactly what we should be doing

[DesScorp]

Not yet.

What exactly are your prerequisites for a manned mission then?

My concerns here about manned exploration are twofold:

One, unless we're going to build a real, permanent base on the moon, and actually keep men there for extended periods of time, then we shouldn't be going back to the moon right now. It'd be a waste, and nothing more than reliving old glories without breaching new frontiers. And with declining budgets, if we actually did go back to the moon, we wouldn't stay. Again, it would essentialy be doing it just to say that we still could. A waste. So the first argument is about needless waste of funds.

Two, as far as the other oft-proposed trip... to Mars... we shouldn't do it because of cost, but mostly, because the technology just isn't there. Specifically, we're lacking a way to keep astronauts fed and healthy for the very long trip. Suspended animation is still science fiction at this point, so unless a true breakthrough in space travel speed is found, we currently have no way to send a bunch of men on a months-long journey to another planet and back, at least not in a manner that we can afford.

The asteroid mission right now is the only place we can actually land a man involving fairly short distances, and with the virtue of it being real exploration, literally where no man has gone before.

Re:Sailing the myriad seas?

[FiloEleven]

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.