Enceladus-3 (March 12, 2008) |
Enceladus-3 (March 12, 2008) |
Guest_AlexBlackwell_* |
Feb 24 2006, 09:12 PM
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#1
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Excerpt from Cassini Significant Events for 02/16/06 - 02/22/06:
"As mentioned in previous weeks, the project has been working on adopting a new reference trajectory in order to raise the minimum Titan flyby altitude for various encounters. Today the project reached a decision to proceed with the 'optocc2' trajectory. Additional work is still to be performed before delivery of the final files. This will include minor tweaks that have been analyzed in other trajectories, adjusting orbit 68 timing, and capture of an Enceladus plume occultation on orbit 28." For the record, the new reference trajectory will result in an even more spectacular Enceladus-3 flyby [61EN (t) E3] on March 12, 2008. |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Mar 10 2006, 05:01 AM
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#2
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Unfortunately, as Jason noted back on his own (sorely missed) Titan blog, whenever Cassini flies by Enceladus it's also flying through the densest part of the E Ring, and has to keep its high-gain dish pointed in the direction of travel as a shield against any unusually large particles -- which means that they can't use image-motion compensation to deblur the craft's closeup photos of Enceladus. (This will certainly be the case if they're flying through the plume at such low altitude.) Thus such incredibly close-range photos would be so badly blurred that their overall resolution wouldn't be much better than the much wider-field photos taken several hundred km out. It's yet another loss resulting from the cancellation of the scan platform, although I don't think anyone could possibly have foreseen back then that Enceladus would turn out to be THIS interesting.
Am I correct in guessing that one of the main purposes of this flyby is to analyze the denser low-altitude portion of the plume, and thus get a better analysis of its trace components? At any rate -- just as we had to do with Europa (and Io) two decades ago -- we must now unexpectedly add another world to our high-priority list of Solar System targets, and start seriously thinking about followup missions. If this eruption has been going on for 100 million years or more, there is a genuine chance that it might be an environment in which life could evolve. Now that's a visionary statement. DOWN, boy! You can't call it "visionary"; but certainly when Ms. Clark and I raised it, it produced a considerable stir in Spilker's little subgroup, suggesting that they hadn't fully considered the consequences of such an Astrobiology Lander failure and thus the full extent of the need to try to make advance observations to minimize its chances of occurring. So I'll settle for "important" rather than "visionary". |
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