Titan exploration beyond Cassini Options

[titanicrivers]

Beyond Cassini
Two proposed future Titan missions to be presented at the 2017 LPSC conference http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2017/pdf/1958.pdf and http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2017/pdf/2306.pdf
promise to extend and enhance Cassini’s discoveries concerning this marvelous world.

[nprev]

Safe landing spot...hmm. You'd need a pretty short-wavelength radar to find such a place that way, and the instrument would likely be power & mass prohibitive (unless you could also justify good science return from it somehow, which seems unlikely).

Sounds like you gotta use the imaging system; maybe have it start looking 30 min before 'bingo' touchdown time using stereo pairs to find a clear spot of minimum specific dimensions. Might be able to constrain slope as well that way, but that seems a bit difficult. Also, if it's flying in an area likely to have surface liquids it either has to be buoyant and survivable in that environment or be able to discriminate between a liquid & solid surface, which again seems challenging using even fairly advanced real-time AI imagery analysis.

[HSchirmer]

Sounds like you gotta use the imaging system; maybe have it start looking 30 min before 'bingo' touchdown time using stereo pairs to find a clear spot of minimum specific dimensions.
...
seems challenging using even fairly advanced real-time AI imagery analysis.

Ya might be surprised at what real time imagery can do.

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/how-dumb-...mart-1673486769
As these hockey puck-like Skeets fly through the air while rapidly spinning, a small infrared imager and laser ranging system activates on each one. The infrared seeker rapidly scans the ground below for an enemy vehicle or weapons fixture that it can recognize, while the laser ranger provides a ground contour map.
...
Ok, so I know you reading this and asking yourself: "are you telling me these little flying pucks can recognize bad guys' vehicles and automatically decide whether or not to engage them while they spin freely through the air at high RPM?" The answer is unequivocally YES.

See
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/...52v0esguj9i.gif