Titan Explorer: A Future NASA Flagship Mission

The Cassini-Huygens mission has provided startling new results at Titan - lakes, dunes, organic aerosol formation in the ionosphere, cryovolcanoes - just to name a view. The science is rich and compelling, but as is usually the case more new questions are raised than old ones answered. We propose a new NASA Flagship class mission, which will explore the Earth-like Organic-rich World of Titan. TITAN EXPLORER is configured as a three element mission: an orbiter, a lander, and a balloon designed to provide a multi-scale study of the intimately coupled interior-surface-atmosphere-magnetosphere system with special emphasis on the production and fate of organics. The full mission complement has 25 instruments ranging from radar altimeters to a surface chemical analysis package. TITAN EXPLORER will orbit Titan for 4 years, returning orders of magnitude more data than Cassini, whose flybys add up to only 4 days. The operations of the balloon and lander are planned to provide data for the first year of the mission. The multi-element nature of the mission presents many options for foreign teaming and cost containment : even an orbiter-only floor mission offers a striking scientific return. The results of the funded NASA study conducted by APL, JPL, Langley, and with science support from SwRI and other institutions are presented in this poster and include the scientific objectives, proposed payload, spacecraft elements and mission design.