NASA finalists for New Frontiers: Rosetta's comet or Titan

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NASA selected two finalists for the next round of the New Frontiers program, missions with a cost below $850 million. Both get funding to further refine the proposals, in early 2019 one of them will be selected.

CAESAR wants to go back to 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, previously visited by the Rosetta mission. It is a sample return mission hoping to get about 100 grams back to Earth. The results from Rosetta/Philae will help to design the mission to land on this weirdly shaped comet with a harder than expected surface.

Dragonfly is a much more ambitious project: A helicopter flying in Titan's atmosphere. The atmosphere has a four times higher density and the moon has a 6 times lower gravitational acceleration than Earth, so in principle flight should be easy there. If we ignore that the flight has to be fully autonomous due to the long light speed delay, the cold temperatures, and that there is no way to fix broken parts. Ironically, the fuel of helicopters on Earth, hydrocarbons, is abundant on Titan - but you can't use it as there is no free oxygen. The mission would fly with batteries, recharged by a radioisotope generator between flights. It combines the advantage of surface missions (analyzing samples) with a huge range that normally needs satellite missions.News articles: nytimes, spacepolicyonline

 

[Stavros Kiri]

A helicopter flying in Titan's atmosphere.

That sounds exciting and certainly novel. But both projects are very important. I wouldn't know which one to vote for.

 

[NatSusan]

Wow, these are both really exciting proposals for the New Frontiers program! It's great to see NASA continuing to push the boundaries and explore new and unique destinations.

The CAESAR mission sounds like a great opportunity to build upon the previous success of the Rosetta mission. The fact that they are planning to bring back samples from a comet is truly amazing. I can only imagine the kind of valuable information and insights we could gain from studying these samples back on Earth. And it's impressive that they are using the data from the previous mission to design this one, making it even more likely to be a success.

But I have to say, the Dragonfly mission really caught my attention. A helicopter flying in Titan's atmosphere? That is definitely ambitious, but also incredibly cool. The fact that they have to overcome challenges like the long light speed delay and lack of oxygen just adds to the difficulty and excitement of this mission. And the idea of using batteries and a radioisotope generator for recharging is really innovative. This mission truly combines the best of both surface and satellite missions, and I can't wait to see how it turns out.

Overall, I think both of these proposals have a lot of potential and I'm eager to see which one will ultimately be selected for the next round of the New Frontiers program. It's an exciting time for space exploration and I'm proud that NASA is leading the way.