When does it snow on Titan? Rain, yes. Lots of Rain, sure. A gentle drizzle from the stratosphere, why not? But, nope, no snow... not cold enough for methane or ethane to fall as snow on Titan, even at the winter pole.

Definitely a good time to check out Jupiter and the four Galilean moons before conjunction which happens in the next couple of months, so Jupiter would then be too close to the Sun.

A minor quibble with the summary above. On January 7, 1610, Galileo only recorded 3 "fixed stars" next to Jupiter. Two of the Galilean moons, Io and Europa, were too close together for Galileo to separate with his 20x power telescope. He continued to observe three moons at most, either because one or more moons were too close to Jupiter and were lost in the glare of the planet, Callisto was too far from Jupiter and was thus out of his telescope's field-of-view, or two of the moons were too close together, during subsequent nights, until January 13, when he was able to see all four for the first time.

Wikipedia is wrong on one point. True, his first observation of all four moon at once didn't come until January 13 and he didn't realize that there were four and not three until that time, but that doesn't mean that one moon's discovery (in Wikipedia's case, Ganymede) should be attributed to that date. By that point, he had observed all four on multiple occasions, just not all four at once. And to that point he hadn't even come to the conclusion that they were in orbit around Jupiter with their own separate orbits, moving a different speeds, until two days later, let alone ascribe identities to each of the stars he saw, connecting one star he saw with another from a different day, beyond the one to the east, the one to the west, and the one in the middle.

Yes, because us Xbox 360 users are completely incapable of also owning a blu-ray player...yeah...

You're welcome.

A 7-meter wide asteroid isn't very big and would almost certainly explode high up in the atmosphere, causing no damage on the ground, except for random meteorites that reach the ground. For that sized object, I would paint a bull's eye on my roof so I would get to see a nice show.

I seem to recall a large world nearby with plentiful water supplies that could be shipped in... It isn't as if lunar settlers would completely cut off from supplies from Earth, the Moon isn't THAT far away. Add that with even a half-decent water recycling system, and water shouldn't be a problem.

Using a US-built instrument. Please leave nationalism out of this...

CC, don't worry too much about the self-advertisement. If you find something cool, and you think people here might be interested, it never hurts to submit the story. For example, I submitted the story about the Titan playas, though it wasn't approved, probably because I submitted it to the wrong place.

No, torrents are a communist plot to destroy Hollywood. Didn't you know that?

Does he really want people to answer that? His card says that he's a douche and is full of himself. His card says that he wasted 25 years of his life working on an effective business card, rather than doing something productive, like watching grass grow. His card says that he has too much money and should be personally taxed more. His card says that he doesn't care about the earth because of all the 4 dollar, nice card stock business cards that will be thrown out after people mutter, "what a douche," after he hands him that (or they just file the info in some sort of electronic address book thingie.

What ever happened to "faster, better, cheaper"??

Mars Polar Lander happened. If you actually want to perform comprehensive science at these targets, you actually need to spend money.

In other words, you can have two out of three of "faster, better, cheaper", but not all three at the same time.

An orbiter is needed before you send a lander for a few reasons. First, our global map of Europa is pretty rough, with only 13% of Europa was imaged at resolutions better than 1 kilometer. That is not good enough if you want to find a good spot to land on. While Europa may have a reputation for having the smoothest surface in the solar system, at the meter-decameter scales (on the size order of a lander), Europa is quite rough, with tectonics grooves criss-crossing the surface and no erosion to wear these features down. So high resolution imaging is need to find relatively smooth areas where it would be safe to land (global coverage at pixel scales of 100 meters is planned for the Jupiter Europa Orbiter with 1-10% coverage at 10 meters per pixel of targets of particular interest).

Secondly, an orbiter is needed to determine the thickness of the ice shell, which is important if you want to access the ocean. Designing a mission that needs to dig down through 2-5 km of ice is quite a bit different than digging through 20-30km. Plus, an orbiter might be able to find areas where the shell is thinner, further helping later lander developers pick a landing site.