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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Titan _ Huygens Surfing?

Posted by: pioneer Dec 6 2004, 06:31 PM

I read a while back on space.com that Titan could have large waves if it does have liquid. Wouldn't the scenario of Huygens landing in liquid and riding the waves be neat? Then again, would that mean the end of the mission? Did the designers ever envision this?

Posted by: remcook Dec 6 2004, 09:51 PM

I think the chance of suriving a 'wet' landing is larger than a 'dry' landing. Anyway, Huygens will float if lands on fluid

Posted by: akuo Dec 6 2004, 11:01 PM

Looking at the NASA press kit, it might not float for a long time. The liquids will seep in. Also a problem is the conductivity of the liquid, probably liquid methane. The probe will freeze much quicker while in the liquid, kill the batteries and mess up the electronics.

Posted by: OWW Dec 7 2004, 09:26 PM

I think the chance of landing 'wet' is minuscule. Look at the radar images. The potential 'dark lakes' are few and far between.

I'm a geology lay-person but in MY fantasy the surface of Titan looks like this:

a Ganymede-like ridged icy-surface with a fluffy organic substance draped on top. The differences in fluffyness causes the albedo variations, just like the dust grainsize does on Mars.
The large dark areas on Titan are basins that serve as 'coarse fluff' traps similar to the bright Hellas and Argyre dustbowls on Mars.
The rectangular bright islands in the dark basins are tectonically shifted blocks of 'old' surface that look a bit like the smaller blocks in Conamara Chaos on Europa. Some of the blocks have craters on top of them with large windstreaks made of the 'fluffy' dust.
The radardark 'lakes' seen on the radar images are Tritonesque frozen methane-lakes.

Basicly some sort of frozen methane-Antarctica...

Posted by: alan Dec 22 2004, 04:31 AM

Description of Huygens mission is up at Cassini Home (1.2 MB)
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/products/pdfs/tcFlyby20041221.pdf

Posted by: alan Dec 22 2004, 04:57 AM

"Post-separation imaging of the Probe (via 5x5 mosaic with the imaging cameras, shown on following page) will be used to improve the knowledge of its ephemeris, entry conditions at Titan, and ultimately the descent trajectory"

Three cameras:

"The characteristics of the imagers are as follows. The high-rsolution imager is a 160x256 pixel CCD at 0.06° per pixel, with a field of view of 10° (horizontally) by 15° (vertically) and is the most downward-looking camera between 7-22° from nadir (straight down). The medium resolution imager is 176x256 pixels at 0.12° per pixel, with a field of view of 21° (horizontally) by 31° (vertically). This camera looks off at an angle from straight down, at 16-46° from nadir. The side-looking imager is 128x256 pixels at 0.2° per pixel, with a field ofview of 26° (horizontally) by 51° (vertically), and looks essentially at the horizon at 45-96° from nadir."

Posted by: douglas-clark Jan 8 2005, 10:23 PM

Hi,

I'm a newbie here. Joined because I think the next couple of weeks are going to be very interesting. Your point about surfing of the surface is funny, but my concern, to be honest is that the high winds on Titan might mess up the parachute deployment. Were the issues of high winds in the Titan stratosphere well known when the probe was being designed?

Douglas

Posted by: djellison Jan 12 2005, 01:29 PM

Chute deployment is fairly high up - so compartively low pressure - and thus winds are less important.

Doug