The point of the mission, actually, is in the going – to see if a spacecraft can successfully land in an extraterrestrial lake, whether it’s of water or some other liquid.
"We got funded to look at the possibility of sending a lake-lander to Titan," said Ellen Stofan, a geologist with Proxemy Research in Maryland. "Scientifically, it's sort of a beyond obvious thing to do."
NASA plans to send three probes in its Titan Saturn System Mission.
The probe won’t be the first Earth visitor to Titan. In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft successfully dropped a parachute-fitted European probe -- named after Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens who discovered Titan in 1655 through a new invention, the telescope -- onto the frigid surface.
"It's very cold, but the technological challenges aren't as big as you might think," Stofan said. "Landing in liquid is a lot more forgiving than on land."
