I keep thinking this trip is being organised in a really bad way for multiple reasons.
Perhaps you have considered all of these potential pitfalls and accounted for them, in which case I would retract my comments. But from what I have seen, nobody is considering how realistic this plan actually is.
If you want to do it, assemble your own team of people you know and trust, fund it yourself, and don't tell anyone about it until you are finished. That is the most likely path to actually finding out something useful, in my opinion.