ponents which need not be designed to cope with wholly unknown alien environments. The experience gained during the Pioneer 11 and Voyager encounters with Saturn and its moons has provided essential prior scientific and engineering data on Titan and its surroundings. The second, equipment heritage, permits investigative techniques developed for earlier missions to be adapted in modified form for the Demonstration. Many pre-Titan spacecraft operations address the same basic objectives in planetary exploration and provide a useful remote-sensing technology base to carry them out. For example, the Viking, Pioneer Venus, and Galileo missions furnish techniques for in situ atmospheric analysis, and valuable experience with surface analyses searching for microbial life was gained during the Viking mission to Mars.
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Figure 3.3.- Relationships between space exploration and other 1980 study areas.
A number of planned or opportunity missions currently under consideration by NASA offer further possibilities for technology development in directions useful for the Titan Demonstration - such as the proposed lunar and Mars missions employing autonomous surface roving vehicles and advanced methods for sample selection, collection and analysis, and the VOIR (Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar) system for the development of a planetary radar mapping capability. Since the global characteristics of Titan are included within the scope of the Demonstration, opportunities for knowledge and for equipment heritage exist with respect to the proposed Saturn Orbiter Dual Probe (SOP2) spacecraft.
In summary, the proposed Titan technology demonstration experiment and major space exploration mission utilizes the knowledge and experience gained in previous NASA operations. In turn, the Demonstation itself serves as the verifying mission for an autonomous space exploration capability which is the ultimate goal.
Figure 3.3 shows the relationships between the research areas of the four Study Teams and the Titan and interstellar
