Dock and Roll: an artist's rendering of NASA's Altair lunar lander approaching the Orion crew capsule after a lunar mission NASA.
The lander is still attached to its protective backshell.
We could send a lander to drop a drilling probe through the kilometers-thick ice or attempt to find a huge fissure to access the sub-surface ocean.
The lander set down on the moon by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong in 1969 is at the center of this image, a small white dot [arrow] with a long shadow stretching to the right.
In the foreground, sits the car-sized lander that sent back images for more than 90 minutes before running out of battery power.
The Mars lander, by contrast, would visit a place where the seas — plain water in this case — vanished long ago.
The pair form the state of Bremen, the tiniest of Germany's 16 lander.
The parachute that slowed Huygen's re-entry is seen in the background, still attached to the lander.
A so-called Earth Departure stage and Altair lunar lander would sit atop the core stage and be launched into orbit to meet Orion spacecraft carrying moon-bound astronauts.
"We have greater control over the orbiter than we used to," says Clinton Dorris, deputy manager of the Altair lander program.
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