Flagship Mission Downselection on February 12

The Flagship Mission Downselection Meeting will take place tomorrow, February 12. At the meeting, the Science chiefs for ESA and NASA, David Southwood and Ed Weiler, will decide between the Titan/Saturn System Mission and the Europa/Jupiter System Mission. I don't have any info on when the downselection will be publicly announced, but hopefully it will before the weekend. My current favorite is the Europa mission because of the great improvement to Jupiter system science it will provide over Galileo. As to which I think will be chosen, my money at the moment is on the Europa mission due to technological readiness and the post-MSL fallout from trying to do too much without prior tech developement on a single mission with the Titan mission.

In the mean time, the more detailed reports on the NASA-provided components are now online. These documents are much longer, both weighing in at longer than 400 pages, so it will take me a bit longer to sift through and summarize here. I will discuss the Europa report, while Van Kane over at the Future Planetary Exploration blog will discuss the Titan report.

Update 02/12/2009 3:31 AM: ustrax on UMSF.com posted an email from Athena Coustenis stating that the downselection announcement maybe made next week.