Exploration has served as a main contributor in molding mankind into the advanced entity it is today.  

From Christopher Columbus to Neil Armstrong, humans have been occupying the forefront of discovery for hundreds of years. This tendency to become more involved with our surroundings has never played a more significant role than when it comes to space exploration. The proposed 2016 mission to Saturn’s moon Titan is potential for another groundbreaking notch in mankind’s expansive belt.

For many, the Titan Mare Explorer mission doesn’t seem like a necessary step in space exploration considering its need for massive NASA funding, but scientists have been researching the distant celestial being for many years. This proposed mission to Saturn’s largest moon, which sits roughly 800 million miles away from Earth, could finally shed light on one of the only objects within our solar system besides our own world that possesses stable bodies of surface liquid.

While Titan’s lakes and rivers are composed of mostly ethane and methane, the moon’s geographical and atmospheric makeup mimic some of Earth’s distinct characteristics. Devon M. Burr, an assistant planetary science professor at the University of Tennessee, specializes in researching the fluvial systems and organic structures of Titan.

“People are really interested in Titan as an astrobiological target,” Burr said. “People call it a frozen early Earth. There’s a lot of organic materials which are carbon based. We consider the methane that flows in the rivers on Titan, as well as the sediment that makes up the sand dunes, organic. So because of this organic material flowing and floating around the surface, people have spent a fair amount of time looking at Titan as sort of a laboratory for prebiotic chemistry.”

Burr’s research over the past few years has revolved around capturing the surface changes on Titan through studying its tectonic features and subsurface faults, more specifically the effect it has on the moon’s river systems.

“We rigorously and quantitatively categorize different drainage patterns on Titan,” Burr said. “From those patterns we infer different controlling factors like rectangular networks, which are controlled by joints or faults in the subsurface.”

There are three major patterns that comprise Titan’s rectangular networks, which are also found on earth. Dendritic, which is comprised of many contributing streams that converge into one main river, is the most common pattern. Parallel is another common drainage system on Titan, but this one functions via swift moving streams that are sloped but often skewed. The most revealing pattern is the trellis system, which is the kind of drainage system that we have on earth in North America’s Appalachian Mountains. This system consists of smaller tributaries feeding into a river from steep slopes on the sides of mountains.  

Burr’s research following these patterns and unique drainage systems, that mostly consist of liquid hydrocarbons such as methane mixed with nitrogen, has led her to one of the most important and sought after features of Titan: its massive lakes.

“Titan has lakes of liquid hydrocarbon and methane mixed together, as well as butane, ethane, propane and liquid nitrogen,” Burr said. “People are really interested in how the chemistry goes on Titan and how different constituents interact with each other because the organic materials are fairly  rudimentary, like the organic material from early earth.”

So as the need to explore these lakes grows larger in order to research Titans earth-like characteristics, the need for the proposed Titan Mare Explorer mission follows suit.

“It’s really expensive to get to the outer solar system,” Burr said. “It’s a long way out, communication travel time takes awhile and it’s dark, so you can’t use solar panels.”

But besides the cost of actually launching a shuttle to Titan, that would approximately take seven years to get to, Burr still insists that the mission is feasible. It’s up to NASA, which has currently proposed to fund concept studies in order to decide whether these potential missions would be beneficial or not, to ultimately ignite the boosters and put Titan’s exploration into full effect.

“The mission is to send a spacecraft to Titan which would jet us in a probe, turn into a boat and fall down through the thick atmosphere to the surface,” Burr said. “It would presumably land in a lake. The lakes are really clustered together at the poles so we think that we could target one and hit it. The winds don’t blow hard and the lakes are fairly large.”

This spacecraft-boat would ultimately traverse Titan’s surface anywhere between three to six months, depending on how costly and how successful, or unsuccessful, the mission becomes. Looking at Titan’s atmosphere, organic makeup and liquid lake structure, the probe would calculate things like wave height, and would have a meteorological station that would take samples of the relative humidity and wind speed on the surface.

But for Burr, who specializes in Titan’s fluvial liquid drainage systems, discovering more of the sort would not be the ultimate mission feat.

“The most amazing thing we could find would be an active volcano,” Burr said. “On Titan we have these cryovolcanoes, or cold volcanoes, so the erupted material is not silicate rock like on earth, but instead it’s ice water mixed with ammonia and other organic constituents.”

If volcanism on Titan really does exist, the hypothesis is that it comes from energy released from the decay of radioactive elements within the moon’s mantle, similar to the volcanic process on earth.

But to this point, the only mission to Saturn and its surrounding satellites has been the Cassini-Huygen mission, which has been in orbit since 2004. The problem has been the probes’ inconsistency to explore Titan and its many features, only making rounds to the Earth-like moon every three or so months. So far, the Cassini-Huygen mission has been able to capture Titan’s polar clouds consisting of methane, as well as using its land probe to photograph the rocky surface.

But for mankind’s sake, with exploration and scientific discovery intertwined, the Titan Mare Explorer mission holds the key to so much more. Maybe even active ice volcanoes orbiting Saturn.