Titan Dragon Lander
Titan Dragon lander and Titan orbit rendezvous(TOR)
The recent fly by of Titan by Cassini occurs at a flyby velocity of 5.8 Kilometers per second, well with in the Dragon Earth orbit reentry speeds.
Dragon TPS should able to handle EDL at Titan from Saturn Orbit.In this concept Dragon does a Titan EDL and splash down,we need to modal Dragon mass and buoyancy on a LCH4 sea.
Dragon deploys smaller surface and submersibles patterned after existing proposals such as Time and TSSM. Extensive mass manufacture of balloon probes from Yellow Dragon could bring down science instruments costs.
Its important to note
THE BUSINESS CASE
We recover our costs by selling science data to NASA as an anchor tenant and other space agency’s and by selling space on the spacecraft as a science “hosted payload”
TSSM_Joint Summary Report_Public Version_090120 (1)
07_Titan Montgolfiere Balloon Analysis and Design Using CFD_J. Hall
09_Buoyancy Estimation of a Titan Aerostat_G. Dorrington
A Titan site!
http://www.titanexploration.com/
update 17 June 2014;
It’s important to note that recent advances in commercial crew have brought advances to the SpaceX Dragon capsule that could have implications to non crewed planetary missions,automated docking for one,this would allow for a TOR or Titan orbit rendezvous . Dragon could EDL the surface of Titan and bring along deploy-able instruments and a Titan ascent vehicle. Since we are using a two Dragon capsule flight system to areobrake at Titan a Dragon remains in Titan orbit to TOR with the ascent vehicle with a sample return.perhaps with ISRU the Dragon Titan lander could make it back into orbit?
