An Encore to Galileo and Cassini! 
NASA and the European Space Agency are rapidly developing a $3-billion outer planets flagship effort that could barnstorm the giant icebergs and subsurface oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa, or deliver a low-altitude imaging airship and a miniature submarine to probe the methane lakes on Saturn's moon Titan.
Teams from the U.S. and Europe are to meet this week in Vienna to refine Titan/Saturn concepts; a similar definition meeting will be held in Rome Apr. 21-24 to weigh Jupiter/Europa concepts.
The results will be reviewed at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory May 8-9 and in Los Angeles May 12-15.
A major instrument workshop, to be held at JPL June 3-5, will then begin final mission definition for selection in November and inclusion in the new NASA federal budget. Either mission will be a powerhouse of advanced technologies.
And each would explore whether life has a foothold far from Earth in warm, watery "Shangri-La's" deeply hidden in the frozen kingdom of the giant planets where a balmy day is -250?F.
Outer planet flagship managers do not want to become "station stuck" - bogged down in a ponderously slow program like the shuttle/International Space Station effort.
Therefore the outer planets flagship will be readied on a fast-paced schedule designed to depart from Cape Canaveral in 2016 and (much like the Cassini spacecraft) arrive at either Jupiter or Saturn, 500 million and 1 billion mi. from Earth, respectively, no more than seven years later.
Really cool!
I hope they do both the aircraft and submarine on Titan and Europa. Talk about a design challenge.
Agreed!
I'm thinking blimp-like things to explore Titan's low-gravity, thick nitrogen-laden atmosphere. The ocean would be more of a challenge being that it would be under ice, but maybe we'll think of something like a cyrobot ...
Europa's thin atmosphere makes such a "blimp" unfeasable but
here's a link (scroll down some) for a "cryobot/hydrobot" gizmo for checking out Europa's ocean.
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