Which mission should NASA have chosen?

NASA has announced its decision to fund the InSight mission to Mars in 2016, the latest mission in the space agency's lower-cost Discovery Program. The aim of InSight will be to explore beneath the Red Planet’s surface, to gain crucial information about the planet’s developmental history.

The decision, however, is under much scrutiny because NASA passed up two other exciting mission proposals: the Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) and the Comet Hopper.

TiME would be a floating buoy designed to explore the methane seas of Saturn’s moon, Titan. It would have been the first ever nautical exploration of an extraterrestrial sea. The Comet Hopper, on the other hand, would orbit and land multiple times on Comet 46P/Wirtanen to study its composition, using thrusters to move around the comet and gather an array of samples.

Which mission do you think NASA should have chosen?

Image credit: JPL/NASA