TiME Options

[rlorenz]

Ahoy mateys!

NASA announces Discovery mission selection for Phase A.

Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) is among them. Har!

[centsworth_II]

Unfortunately it does look a bit iffy for getting good descent images of the shoreline. Just for fun, I superimposed pre-Huygens landing descent image footprint projections over a map of Ligeia Mare. Haze would probably prevent good imaging outside of the green octagon, which barely touches the shore. The really good wide Huygens panorama was within the magenta circle, and the great landing area panorama would just cover the black X. I'm hoping for some improvements over the Huygens "camera". Maybe a telescopic lens?

The probe being blown to shore during the course of the mission doesn't look too good either. The probe could easily land 100 km from the shore and even a "perfect" wind, blowing constantly in one direction toward the nearest shoreline would need to blow the probe over a kilometer a day for three months. Not a likely scenario.

[ugordan]

I'm hoping for some improvements over the Huygens "camera". Maybe a telescopic lens?

You don't want a telescopic lens. It's not the angular resolution that's the problem, it's the haze extinction. You want a really good S/N ratio to combat the reduction in contrast when looking through an optically thick layer of haze. Huygens DISR was already pretty good in this respect. IIRC it returned 10 bit data to Earth, square-root-encoded from 14 bit A/D output. 10 bit data is still pretty much standard for spacecraft today.

Where there could be some improvement over Huygens is in selecting a narrow spectral window like ISS CB3 instead of a broader range Huygens used. This does come at a price though - much longer exposures needed and if your spacecraft is rocking really hard on the way down this virtually guarantees image smear.