NASA’s Mission to Titan Titan is one of the moons of the planet Saturn. It has interested scientists ever since it was discovered, but it interests them even more now since they have discovered what the moon is like. It looks like it has rivers and lakes, but it is really liquid methane on the moon. Some scientists believe life could still exist on this moon and on top of that, they now believe the liquid methane is a plus, because it can be used as fuel for a return trip back to earth for a spacecraft. The moon also has a frozen surface and under this ice, scientists think there is water. As we all know by now, they believe where water exists there is a good chance of life, if the life on earth is any indication. The moon titan is pretty big for a moon, being larger than the planet Mercury and the second biggest moon in the solar system with only Jupiter’s moon Ganymede being larger. Ganymede does have something Titan doesn’t however and that is its own magnetic field. Scientists want to conduct experiments on Titan and want to start by bringing back some material from Titan. As I have said many times, we have to be very careful when we bring back things from off world. I think the recent pandemic should be a warning about how fast a microbe can infect the human race and an alien microbe might be unstoppable. Studies are being conducted on different scenarios for bringing back material, but this is a feat which is still beyond us as of the writing of this article. First of all, the round trip would take about six and one half years. It takes over an hour just to send a command to Titan to operate a device. If the spacecraft is going to use methane from Titan to refuel the entire procedure has to be worked out. We don’t even know if it is feasible. It might be more practical to use a nuclear rocket, but you have to make sure it won’t contaminate the moon. The nuclear rocket should be able to make the round trip without refueling and also save some travel time. One very complicated trip to Titan has been talked about for years. The trip was to be for the purpose of checking the water under the ice for life. The idea was to build some sort of machine which would melt the ice, which is over a mile thick, and then insert a specially built small submarine into the hole and into the water, which in turn would look for sea life. When looking for life anywhere, there is always the chance it could be intelligent. Just because life is in water on some body in space doesn’t mean it couldn’t be intelligent. We have to always be prepared for this eventuality and figure out a way we could determine this. Other missions had been proposed which would have went to Saturn, but also explored Titan. This trip was planned and called the Titan Saturn System Mission or TSSM. It was supposed to launch in 2020, cost 2.5 billion dollars and use gravity assists from Earth and Venus to slingshot it to the planet. It would have taken 9 years to get to Saturn. The mission was pushed on to the back burner when scientists decided it was more important to get to Jupiter and its moons. It is said the Saturn mission is still being considered, but the 2.5 billion dollar cost was in 2007 dollars and the mission would cost far more today. The idea for TSSM was to send a hot air balloon and lander on Titan. The balloon would float in the clouds above the surface while the lander would splash down into one of the seas. I don’t understand this since the seas are covered with ice, so maybe they meant splash down in one of the methane lakes or rivers. The balloon was to float around the entire circumference of the planet. We have come a long way in technology since this mission was first proposed, and it is possible if it were ever carried out, it would be in a much different way. In 2019 NASA announced a new mission to Titan called Dragonfly. Titan has a thick atmosphere so NASA wants to send a rotorcraft-lander to the moon which can fly around to many different areas. If nothing changes the launch date will be 2026, but will take 8 years to reach the moon. Its target date so far is 2034. This looks like a far improved TSSM mission, doesn’t it? The rotorcraft is a vast improvement over a balloon which might be subject to unexpected wind bursts. Interestingly, NASA was able to determine when Titan would be at its calmest. They used the data gained from the 13 years of Cassini data. Cassini was a collaboration with NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. It sent a probe to Saturn with a lander built by the European Space Agency. Titan has a similarity to Earth in that it has a nitrogen rich atmosphere, but it rains methane which its clouds are composed of. Some scientists think there might be some similarities to those of the early earth when life sprang up. Many scientists think there is a very good chance the water on Titan may house similar life to what we have in our oceans. Could there be Sea Bass or Flounder in the Titan oceans? Maybe. On the other hand, if life does exist in these oceans, it might be completely different than the life here. One theory which supports life being similar is called panspermia. According to this theory life is being seeded by meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids and other things. If this is true life forms might be similar everywhere or even identical in some places in the universe. I guess everyone has noticed the NASA missions are getting more ambitious and far more complicated. With this type of complication comes risks. The missions may not all be huge successes as the latest Mars mission was. Other nations are getting better with their missions. We could save a lot of money and get a much bigger bang for our buck if we all decided to cooperate on missions. One of the biggest problems would be all agreeing on the same mission. Another problem might be countries joining with NASA just to steal technology. All this would have to be worked out, but who knows how much further into space exploration this might get us.
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