http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2009-058
About 38 percent of Titan's surface has been mapped with radar so far. On March 27, Cassini will complete its 52nd targeted flyby of Titan.

is the 38% figure including the low-res scatterometer coverage?

ftp://ftp.lpi.usra.edu/pub/outgoing/lpsc2009/full254.pdf page 11

Hi all,
If there was an announcement on XXM funding, I've missed it. The above goes back to February - does anybody know when a decision can be expected on a go/no-go for the XXM?

Anybody know when a decision is to be reached on this? There seems to be a lot of Cassini news today, and the tour highlights for all of 2010 appearing on the Cassini website did make me wonder if something could be happening.

We hope to know more after the President's 2011 NASA budget is released in early February. However it's very unlikely that the plug will be pulled with only a few month's notice, so it's a pretty good bet (but with no guarantees) that the current 2010 flight plan will be executed as currently planned.

John

It would also be horrible PR to pull the plug on a fully functional mission simply due to budgets.

Oh it will surely happen - there's the definitive proof of the Rhea rings to confirm yet, the further radar coverage of Titan, the incomparable PR generated by the 'proximal orbits' and so on.
A saturn orbiter is surely priceless.

There's nothing to confirm just yet. There is no discovery, only tantalizing hints and from what I've seen in various ISS observations apparently targeted at imaging the rings, that's going to be a very tough nut to crack. Not sure how other instruments would be able to nail the case. Would RADAR be able to get any reflection from a few boulders some thousands of km away?

The evidence is from particle and fields data (MIMI), not ISS. There is something there, the question is what that something is.

I realize where the claim comes from. Didn't the same instrument pick up hints of activity on Dione? Highly suggestive and tantalizing stuff, but I wouldn't exactly call it evidence by itself. Yes, there definitely appears to be something there around Rhea, but we have no proof it's rings, hence my comment about confirmation with other instruments.

The broad electron depletion seen by MIMI in 2005 can apparently be explained by a broad disk of debris orbiting Rhea; further narrow dropouts on either side of the moon suggested that discrete rings could be embedded in a more diffuse disk. CAPS also saw a similar broad decrease during a more distant flyby in 2007; both the flybys were downstream, so not providing the full picture of the plasma-moon/debris interaction. The next close Rhea flyby's little over a month away on March 2nd; inbound slightly downstream of Rhea in the plasma flow, outbound slightly upstream - maybe we'll get a better picture of what's going on there from those observations.

Hints of activity at Dione came from the magnetometer data, and some have interpreted features seen by CAPS as being signs of plasma release at Dione and Tethys.

The magnetometer did not actually pick up hints of activity at Dione. It has detected a field deformation that could occur if newly produced ions (e.g. ionized products from an exosphere around Dione) are added to the surrounding plasma flow. The inference of activity is based on the lack of direct evidence that a substantial exosphere exists around Dione, and from theoretical calculations suggesting/(confirming?) that surface sputtering from plasma cannot account for any considerable exosphere around that moon.

So practically, what was detected were hints of mass addition near the moon. The origin of this mass addition is still undetermined, but the favored scenario is that there is activity. On the other hand, we now know that around the period of the flyby, Dione was immersed in a new radiation belt (produced after a solar storm impacted Saturn) , the presence of which could have modified the sputtering rates and have produced a transient exosphere...

One flyby is never enough...

69 days, 4 hours, 53 minutes and 17 seconds until D2

Did I miss something?

In the 1/27 press release on the T66 flyby, it says that this will be the "22nd Titan encounter in Cassini's Solstice Mission."

I am sure that it is a slip of the pen, but it is almost certainly a good sign that john_s is right and the Solstice Mission is a go. Can't wait for the formal announcement, though.

And I really can't wait for those proximal orbits.

Isn't solstice what we're in now?

Phil