International Workshop on Instrumentation for Planetary Missions (2012) 1013.pdf TITAN SATURN SYSTEM MISSION INSTRUMENTATION A. Coustenis1, J. Lunine2, K. Reh3, J.-P. Lebreton4, C. Erd5, P. Beauchamp3, C. Sotin3 and D. Matson3, 1LESIA, Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, 92195 Meudon, France,
[email protected] , 2Cornell Univ., 3Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, 4LPC2E/CNRS, Orléans, France, 5ESA/ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands. Introduction: Titan is a high priority for explora- tan and Enceladus), the Titan Aerial Explorer (TAE) tion, as recommended by NASA’s 2006 Solar System and TiME, which we briefly describe in a later section. Exploration (SSE) Roadmap [1], NASA’s 2003 Natio- nal Research Council (NRC) Decadal Survey [2] and ESA’s Cosmic Vision Program Themes. Recent revo- lutionary Cassini-Huygens discoveries have dramati- cally escalated interest in Titan. We present here the results of a study as documented in the TSSM Final Report [3] and Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) NASA/ESA Joint Summary Report [4] and we briefly describe some later Titan mission studies. Figure 2. The TSSM orbiter will have multiple op- portunities to sample Enceladus' plumes. The TSSM Science Goals as shown in Table 1 res- pond directly to NASA’s science objectives, ESA’s Figure 1. The release of the montgolfière from the Cosmic Vision themes, and science questions raised by TSSM orbiter the extraordinary discoveries by Cassini-Huygens. TSSM science would embrace geology, meteorology, Following 50 years of space exploration, the Cassi- chemistry, dynamics, geophysics, space physics, hydro- ni-Huygens mission has revealed the Earth-like world logy, and a host of other disciplines.