The European Space Agency has just released a list of candidate missions for the 2015-2025 time frame. Among then is a mission to explore Titan and Enceladus:

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM1IQAMS7F_index_2.html

Is it too ambitious? And how does it jive with the Flagship missions NASA is thinking about?

- John Sheff
Cambridge, MA

First, am I reading that article correctly? Out of the nine proposals total, two will be selected? There could easily be no solar system mission if that's true.

No, I personlly don't think it's too ambitious if you're willing to spend the necessary cash for it. The Cassini-Huygens dataset should easily support planning for a mission like this.

I think that ESA tries to balance its program, so I expect one planetary and one astronomy mission. The key for the planetary mission is that NASA has to agree, since it's participation is essential for the Jupiter and Titan missions. My *guess* is that the asteroid sample return is back up alternative.

Too bad that there aren't any proposals to Uranus or Neptune

BBC put out an article on the topic. They make it seem that ESA should probably pick one "Large" class mission (Laplace, Tandem, XEUS, Spica) and one "Medium" class mission (Cross-Scale, Marco Polo, Dune, Space, and Plato) by 2017 and 2018, respectively.

Obviously these missions are well down the pipeline and a number of things need to fall into place for these birds to get off the ground. Also, the "Large" missions are budgeted in the range of EUR650million, which is not enough to get a meaningful mission to the outer planets.

Thus, there needs to be some international collaboration. Whether NASA and ESA can pull off another Cassini-Huygens class success story remains to be seen, and as far as I can tell the international community hasn't decided whether Jupiter or Saturn is a higher priority. Hopefully this problem stimulates some constructive dialog.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7053057.stm