The Titan Mare Explorer Mission - Essay Example

NASA later selected nine DSMCE missions among them TiME. By 2011 the teams had been narrowed down to three with TiME being among them. After the discovery of several lakes and a sea in the north between 2004 and 2007 by Cassini’s flyby, studies for tandem flagship began, which inspired the formation of the TiME team.

The TiME team proposed a mission to land on the methane surface of Saturn’s moon to explore and interact with its atmosphere. Among the goals that were set to be achieved by TiME include: carrying out for the first time a direct inspection of an extraterrestrial sea, measuring and sampling the organic makeup of a different planet directly, and giving the first-ever extended in situ research of a liquid volatile cycle away from earth. The other proposal of the group was called Comet Hopper or Chopper.

The proposal involved placing a Lander on the surface of comet 46P/Wirtanen to study its composition. Since it was to have thrusters it would be able to move from one part of the comet to the other. The Titan Mare Explorer Mission was to explore directly an environment that is like an ocean beyond earth. The vessel known as TiME was to both land and float on this sea of the methane-ethane cloudy and complex moon. The team for this mission was led by principal investigator Ellen Stofan of Proxemy Research Inc.

While the time capsule was to be built by Lockheed Martin in Denver. Instruments would have been gotten from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, APL, and Malin Space Science Systems. The technology that would have been used is one of a kind. Titan has an atmosphere that is thicker than that of the earth, this means solar power would not have been used and the battery would only be sufficient for a few hours. This would have left the option of using an Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG).

This would have provided power that is four times that of radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). Before TiME other missions had similar objectives such as Solar System Decadal Survey which could see its launch in the 2020s if considered under the Titan-Saturn System Mission, and Titan Lake In-situ Sampling Propelled Explorer or “TALISE”. The latter is based in Europe. Compared to other missions that had landed on Titan such as Huygens, TiME would have sent information back to earth directly. Huygens transmitted its information first to the orbiting Cassini spacecraft before it reached earth.